ISTANBUL: A court in Istanbul has ordered 15 of 34 people detained on suspicion of spying for Israel be held in prison awaiting trial, Turkiye’s justice minister said late Friday.
The suspects were arrested Tuesday for allegedly planning to carry out activities that included “reconnaissance” and “pursuing, assaulting and kidnapping” foreign nationals living in Turkiye.
Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said in a social media post that 26 suspects were referred to the court on a charge of committing “political or military espionage” on behalf of Israeli intelligence. Eleven were released under judicial control conditions and eight were awaiting deportation.
Israel’s foreign intelligence agency Mossad is said to have recruited Palestinians and Syrian nationals inside Turkiye as part of the operation against foreigners living in Turkiye, state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
The agency cited a prosecution document as saying the operation targeted “Palestinian nationals and their families … within the scope of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
One suspect allegedly collected information about Palestinian patients recently transferred to Turkiye for health care. Turkiye has accepted dozens of Palestinian patients from Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
The suspects were detained in raids on 57 addresses in Istanbul and seven other provinces. Weeks earlier, the head of Israel’s domestic Shin Bet security agency said his organization was prepared to target Hamas anywhere, including in Lebanon, Turkiye and Qatar.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Israel of “serious consequences” if it pressed ahead with its threat to attack Hamas officials on Turkish soil.
Turkiye and Israel had normalized ties in 2022 by reappointing ambassadors following years of tensions. But those ties quickly deteriorated after the Israel-Hamas war, with Ankara becoming one of the strongest critics of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
Israel initially withdrew its diplomats from Turkiye over security concerns and later announced it was recalling its diplomats for political reasons, citing “increasingly harsh statements” from Turkish officials. Turkiye also pulled out its ambassador from Israel.
Erdogan’s reaction to the Israel-Hamas war was initially fairly muted. But the Turkish leader has since intensified his criticism of Israel, describing its actions in Gaza as verging on “genocide.” He has called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be prosecuted for “war crimes” and compared him to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Erdogan, whose government has hosted several Hamas officials in the past, has also said the militant group — considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union — is fighting for the liberation of its lands and people.
15 suspects jailed in Turkiye ahead of trial for spying for Israel
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15 suspects jailed in Turkiye ahead of trial for spying for Israel
- Suspects were arrested for allegedly planning to carry out activities that included “pursuing, assaulting and kidnapping” foreign nationals living in Turkiye
- Mossad is said to have recruited Palestinians and Syrian nationals inside Turkiye
10 killed as Israeli airstrike targets shelter for displaced families in Gaza, medics say
- Israel has killed more than 45,500 Palestinians in the war in Gaza, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave
CAIRO: An Israeli airstrike killed at least 10 Palestinians in a tent encampment sheltering displaced families in southern Gaza Strip early on Thursday, medics said.
The 10 people, including women and children, were killed in a tent in Al-Mawasi, designated as a humanitarian area in western Khan Younis, according to the medics.
Fifteen people were also wounded, the medics added. The Israeli military has not immediately commented.
Israel has killed more than 45,500 Palestinians in the war in Gaza, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and much of the tiny coastal strip is in ruins.
The war was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
11 years on, Syria protesters demand answers on abducted activists
- No group has claimed the four activists’ abduction and they have not been heard from since
DOUMA, Syria: A few dozen protesters gathered in the Syrian city of Douma on Wednesday demanding answers about the fate of four prominent activists abducted more than a decade ago.
Holding up photographs of the missing activists, the demonstrators called on Syria’s new rulers — the Islamist-led rebels who seized power last month — to investigate what happened to them.
“We are here because we want to know the whole truth about two women and two men who were disappeared from this place 11 years and 22 days ago,” said activist Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh, whose wife Samira Khalil was among those abducted.
In December 2013, Khalil, Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada and Nazem Al-Hammadi were kidnapped by unidentified gunmen from the office of a human rights group they ran together in the then rebel-held city outside Damascus.
The four played an active role in the 2011 uprising against Bashar Assad’s rule and also documented violations, including by the Islamist rebel group Jaish Al-Islam that controlled the Douma area in the early stages of the ensuing civil war.
No group has claimed the four activists’ abduction and they have not been heard from since.
Many in Douma blame Jaish Al-Islam but the rebel group has denied involvement.
“We have enough evidence to incriminate Jaish Al-Islam, and we have the names of suspects we would like to see investigated,” Hajj Saleh said.
He said he wanted “the perpetrators to be tried by the Syrian courts.”
The fate of tens of thousands of people who disappeared under the Assads’ rule is a key question for Syria’s interim rulers after more than 13 years of devastating civil war that saw upwards of half a million people killed.
“We are here because we want the truth. The truth about their fate and justice for them, so that we may heal our wounds,” said Alaa Al-Merhi, 33, Khalil’s niece.
Khalil was a renowned activist hailing from the Assads’ Alawite minority who was jailed from 1987 to 1991 for opposing their iron-fisted rule.
Her husband is also a renowned human rights activist who was detained in 1980 and forced to live abroad for years.
“We as a family seek justice, to know their fate and to hold those resposible accountable for their actions,” she added.
Zeitouneh was among the 2011 winners of the European parliament’s human rights prize, A lawyer, she had received threats from both the government and the rebels before she went missing. Her husband Hamada was abducted with her.
Protesting was unthinkable just a month ago in Douma, a former rebel stronghold that paid a heavy price for rising up against the Assads.
Douma is located in Eastern Ghouta, an area controlled by rebel and jihadist factions for around six years until government forces retook it in 2018 after a long and bloody siege.
The siege of Eastern Ghouta culminated in a devastating offensive by the army that saw at least 1,700 civilians killed before a deal was struck that saw fighters and civilians evacuated to northern Syria.
Douma still bears the scars of the civil war, with many bombed out buildings.
During the conflict, all sides were accused of abducting and summarily executing opponents.
How two civilian deaths highlighted the tragic toll of Middle East conflict
- Mohamad Nasrallah, 18, died in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut while Gevara Ebraheem, 11, died in a Hezbollah rocket attack on Majdal Shams
- The death of these two young people has come to symbolize the loss of a generation’s potential amid the Israel-Hezbollah conflict
LONDON: As Israeli air attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs intensified, 18-year-old university student Mohamad Nasrallah left his home and sought refuge in the more northerly neighborhood of Hamra, near the Lebanese American University where he was studying.
On Sept. 26, Mohamad and his sister, Mirna, made the fatal decision to return briefly to their home to collect some belongings.
Later, it emerged they had returned to collect some items to donate to the many displaced Lebanese who had fled north to escape the anticipated Israeli ground invasion, which would begin on Oct. 1.
While they were there, their building was hit by an Israeli airstrike, killing Mohamad and seriously injuring his sister.
Two months earlier, on July 27, an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket with a 50 kg warhead had struck the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
The rocket landed on a soccer pitch, killing 12 children enjoying a Saturday evening game and injuring dozens more.
Hezbollah has always denied its role in the attack, although it seems certain that the missile was fired from southern Lebanon and had overshot its intended target — an Israeli military base a few kilometers north of Majdal Shams.
The following day, 11 of the 12 victims, aged 11 to 16, were buried in their white coffins.
Initially, there had been hopes that the twelfth victim, 11-year-old Gevara Ebraheem, had somehow survived the blast.
For 24 hours he had been considered missing, even after the family discovered that he had not, as they were at first told, been taken alive to Ziv Medical Center in nearby Safed.
In fact, as Israeli authorities revealed that Sunday evening, after a painstaking examination of the scene, forensic investigators had concluded that the small child had been virtually obliterated by the blast.
Hundreds of mourners attended Gevara’s funeral the following day, when Majdal Shams received a visit from Israel’s then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who pledged the children’s deaths would be avenged.
“There’s no difference between a Jewish child who was murdered in the south of Israel on Oct. 7 and a Druze child who was murdered in the Golan Heights,” he told mourners at Gevara’s funeral.
He added: “It’s the same thing, these are our children … Hezbollah will pay a price for this.”
Not everyone shared Gallant’s wish for vengeance. Nabeeh Abu Saleh, a paramedic who had rushed to the scene of the attack to find his nephew among the dead, told the Associated Press: “We buried our children. We don’t want retaliation.
“We have families in Lebanon, in Syria, and we have brothers here.”
Nevertheless, just three days later, senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr, deemed responsible for the Majdal Shams attack, was killed, along with an Iranian military adviser, in a targeted Israeli airstrike on his residential building in Beirut.
Also reported killed were his wife, two other women, and two children.
In one sense, it might seem invidious to highlight just two deaths out of the tens of thousands that have occurred in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon since the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
But in the face of so much death, there is a danger of succumbing to the proverb attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin — that one death is a tragedy, but thousands merely a statistic — and losing sight of the individual suffering behind each number.
Although they lived lives separated by birth, borders, and beliefs, Mohamad Nasrallah and Gevara Ebraheem share one thing in common — in death, they were mourned as individuals by families, friends, and communities.
What is more, as young people whose hopes, dreams, and potential have been violently cut short, they must also be grieved as representatives of a lost future.
While Gevara meant everything to his surviving parents and younger brother, few details have emerged about his life.
A photograph released by his family shows a happy boy, as mad about soccer as any child his age. In it, he sports Real Madrid’s 23-24 home kit. In another photograph, held aloft by mourners at his funeral, Gevara, smiling broadly, is wearing a red Zeus club football top.
But like all children in the region whose futures hang daily in the balance, it is clear that Gevara was both aware of the precarious and volatile nature of the world around him, and yearned desperately for better days ahead.
IN NUMBERS
• $8.5 billion Cost of Lebanon’s physical damage and economic losses caused by conflict.
• 6.6% Reduction’s of Lebanon real GDP growth in 2024 due to conflict.
According to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, just days after the start of the Gaza war, the 10-year-old posted a simple but moving plea on Facebook: “We don’t want war,” he wrote. “We want to live in peace.”
Gevara would be granted only the peace of the grave. The path in life that he might have taken, and the light he might have been able to bring to the world, will now never be known.
But his death is no less poignant than that of Mohamad Nasrallah, whose future was already more clearly defined.
On Dec. 10, Mohamad’s friends and family gathered on the Beirut campus of the Lebanese American University to pay tribute to one of its brightest students, as he was described in a report on the memorial published on the university’s website on Dec. 17.
Mohamad, a business student with dreams of establishing a startup, “had already accomplished so much” and “had built strong friendships at LAU and everywhere he went.”
The memorial was attended by Mohamad’s father Ali, mother Fadia, and sisters Dana, Sally, and Mirna, who was still recovering from her injuries.
Dana, Mohamad’s eldest sister, 10 years his senior, recalled how her brother had been determined to graduate top of his class and be selected as his year’s commencement speaker.
“Our brother and his ambitions were larger than life,” she said. That she was addressing his classmates instead at his memorial “brought her to tears,” the LAU reporter wrote.
Some of Mohamad’s many friends also spoke at the memorial. Angelina El Zaghir beseeched her fellow classmates to “speak his name and carry forward his life, dreams, and love, because Mohamad would have wanted us to.”
Dani Taan pledged to make his best friend proud.
Mohammad Shouman said he took strength from “looking around and seeing that my tears are part of a collective well, which pours water from your martyrdom and hope from your existence.”
It fell to Dr. Raed Mohsen, the university’s dean of students and co-founder of the Lebanese Association for Mediation and Conciliation, to urge Mohamad’s fellow students to embrace that hope and reject despair.
“Witnessing your resolve to strive for a better future offers us some consolation,” he said. “We can see Mohamad’s unfaltering spirit in every one of you.”
As 2024 draws to a close, it is a message that will resonate with thousands of families across the region, each one mourning their own Mohameds and Gevaras and hoping against hope that 2025 will mark the beginning of that better future.
Tens of thousands of people in Istanbul protest Gaza war
- Demonstrators waved Turkish and Palestinian flags and chanted “Free Palestine” in the protest
- Bilal Erdoğan, the son of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, addressed the crowd, urging support for Gaza and condemning Israel’s actions
ISTANBUL/JERUSALEM: Tens of thousands of people gathered on Istanbul’s Galata Bridge on New Year’s Day on Wednesday to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Demonstrators waved Turkish and Palestinian flags and chanted “Free Palestine” in the protest, organized by the National Will Platform, a coalition of more than 300 pro-Palestinian and Islamic groups.
Bilal Erdoğan, the son of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, addressed the crowd, urging support for Gaza and condemning Israel’s actions there.
He referred to the recent ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad by rebel forces.
“Muslims in Syria were determined, patient and they achieved victory. After Syria, Gaza will emerge victoriously from the siege,” he said.
Drone video showed thousands of people filling the bridge and the adjacent Eminönü and Sirkeci districts.
President Erdoğan has been a fierce critic of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Israel’s military said two projectiles were fired from Gaza on Wednesday in the first minutes of the new year, one of which was intercepted while the other landed in an open area.
Alert sirens sounded around midnight (2200 GMT) in the western Negev, the Israeli military said, and “two projectiles were identified crossing from the central Gaza Strip into Israeli territory.”
“One projectile was successfully intercepted and the second projectile fell in an open area,” the army said on Telegram.
The military said it has intercepted several rockets fired from northern Gaza in recent days.
Since October, Israeli operations in Gaza have focused on the north, with officials saying their land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
The Gaza war was triggered by the unprecedented Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed more than 45,500 people in Gaza.
Israel’s former defense chief Gallant quits politics
- Yoav Gallant was fired from the Israeli government in November after disagreements over the conduct of the war in Gaza
JERUSALEM: Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who had often taken an independent line against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government allies, said on Wednesday he was resigning from parliament.
Gallant was fired from the government in November by Netanyahu, after months of disagreements over the conduct of the war against Hamas in Gaza, but kept his seat as an elected member of the Knesset.
“Just as it is on the battlefield, so it is in public service. There are moments in which one must stop, assess and choose a direction in order to achieve the goals,” Gallant said in a televised statement.
Gallant had often broken ranks with Netanyahu and his coalition allies of far-right and religious parties, including over exemptions granted to ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from serving in the conscript military — a hot button issue.
In March 2023, Netanyahu fired Gallant after he urged a halt to a highly contested government plan to cut the Supreme Court’s powers. His dismissal triggered mass protests and Netanyahu backtracked.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Gallant and Netanyahu, along with a Hamas leader, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict, which Israel has contested.