GAZA: Tens of thousands of people crammed into a street in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where vast numbers have sought refuge from advancing Israeli ground troops.
“These are the worst months of our lives,” said Noha Al-Madhun, who fled from the Beit Lahia area of northern Gaza and was taken in by relatives along with some of her children.
“My husband and eldest sons sleep in a tent. There’s no space for everyone. We sleep on the floor and we feel the cold” without enough blankets to go round, she said.
“There aren’t enough apartments or even places to set up extra tents,” added Madhun.
More than half of Gaza’s population of 2.4 million is in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, according to the United Nations.
Those without relatives to host them or the means to rent apartments have found themselves in tents wherever there is space: along streets, in public squares, sports stadiums or parks.
Abdulkarim Misbah, 32, said he left his home in the northern Jabalia refugee camp and reached Khan Yunis, only to be uprooted once more.
“We escaped last week from death in Khan Yunis, without bringing anything with us. We didn’t find a place to stay. We slept on the streets the first two nights. The women and children slept in a mosque,” he said.
Then they received a donated tent, setting it up right beside the Egyptian border.
“My four children are shivering from the cold. They feel sick and unwell all the time,” said Misbah.
Most people are concentrated in the city center or west, trying to avoid the eastern edges toward the Israeli border or the north which is dangerously close to fighting in nearby Khan Yunis.
After the war erupted on October 7 with Hamas militants’ unprecedented attack on Israel, the country’s military ordered Gazans to leave their homes in the north.
Those instructions have since expanded, forcing many Palestinians to flee time and again.
Gaza City resident Amjad Abdel Aal, who fled to a school shelter in Rafah, said it took her two hours to be driven a distance which before the war would take just 15 minutes.
“The congestion was awful,” she said, waiting in a wheelchair in a long line for donations of blankets and mattresses.
“There aren’t a lot of cars because of the fuel shortage. Everyone walks, rides a truck or donkey cart,” added the barefoot 28-year-old.
The United Nations estimates 1.7 million have been forced from their homes by the war since October 7.
The Hamas attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of around 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel’s withering offensive has killed at least 27,131 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
With Egypt’s border firmly shut to most Gazans throughout the war, the streets of Rafah have become packed with displaced people.
Mehran Dabbabish, 41, a taxi driver from Khan Yunis, said the situation was “getting worse by the day.”
“The road between Khan Yunis and Rafah used to take 20 to 30 minutes at worst. Today, the shortest trip within Rafah takes an hour and a half to two hours,” he told AFP.
The overcrowding is putting a massive strain on everyone and means moving anywhere, by any means, is incredibly difficult.
Another Gazan, Naima Al-Bayumi, lamented how tired she was just halfway through a four-hour journey by foot to visit her relative in hospital.
“I rode a donkey cart a few times and fell off because of the intense scramble,” she told AFP.
Bayumi started crying as she recounted the bombardment which hit her home, killing her baby twins.
“I gave birth to them in the first week of the war, after 13 years of marriage,” said the 38-year-old, who lives in a tent with her husband.
“I don’t want to live anymore,” she said.
Elsewhere on the road, people helped another woman clamber aboard a truck filled with dozens of passengers.
She clung to the side of the truck with her baby, to stop them falling out, and screamed: “Death is more merciful than this life!”
‘No space for everyone’: Rafah overwhelmed with fleeing Gazans
https://arab.news/93hfe
‘No space for everyone’: Rafah overwhelmed with fleeing Gazans
- Hostilities in Khan Younis have forced more people to flee to Rafah
- More than half of Gaza’s population of 2.4 million is in Rafah, on the border with Egypt
Hamas-run Gaza’s health ministry says war death toll at 44,235
- 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
GAZA CITY: The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Monday that at least 44,235 people have been killed in more than 13 months of war between Israel and Palestinian militants.
The toll includes 24 deaths in the previous 24 hours, according to the ministry, which said 104,638 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
Syria’s ‘large quantities’ of toxic arms serious concern: watchdog
- The war has killed more than half a million people, displaced millions, and ravaged the country’s infrastructure and industry
THE HAGUE: The world’s chemical watchdog said Monday that it was “seriously concerned” by large gaps in Syria’s declaration about its chemical weapons stockpile, as large quantities of potentially banned warfare agents might be involved.
Syria agreed in 2013 to join the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, shortly after an alleged chemical gas attack killed more than 1,400 people near Damascus.
“Despite more than a decade of intensive work, the Syrian Arab Republic chemical weapons dossier still cannot be closed,” the watchdog’s director-general Fernando Arias told delegates at the OPCW’s annual meeting.
The Hague-based global watchdog has previously accused President Bashar Assad’s regime of continued attacks on civilians with chemical weapons during the Middle Eastern country’s brutal civil war.
“Since 2014, the (OPCW) Secretariat has reported a total of 26 outstanding issues of which seven have been fulfilled,” in relation to chemical weapon stockpiles in Syria, Arias said.
“The substance of the remaining 19 outstanding issues is of serious concern as it involves large quantities of potentially undeclared or unverified chemical warfare agents and chemical munitions,” he told delegates.
Syria’s OPCW voting rights were suspended in 2021, an unprecedented rebuke, following poison gas attacks on civilians in 2017.
Last year the watchdog blamed Syria for a 2018 chlorine attack that killed 43 people, in a long-awaited report on a case that sparked tensions between Damascus and the West.
Damascus has denied the allegations and insisted it has handed over its stockpiles.
Syria’s civil war broke out in 2011 after the government’s repression of peaceful demonstrations escalated into a deadly conflict that pulled in foreign powers and global jihadists.
The war has killed more than half a million people, displaced millions, and ravaged the country’s infrastructure and industry.
Syria state TV says Israel struck bridges near border with Lebanon
- The defense ministry said “the Israeli enemy launched an air aggression from the direction of Lebanese territory, targeting crossing points that it had previously hit” between the two countries
DAMASUS: Syrian state television reported Israeli strikes on several bridges in the Qusayr region near the Lebanese border on Monday, with the defense ministry reporting two civilians injured in the attacks.
Israel’s military has intensified its strikes on targets in Syria since its conflict with Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon escalated into full-scale war in late September after almost a year of cross-border hostilities.
“An Israeli aggression targeted the bridges of Al-Jubaniyeh, Al-Daf, Arjoun, and the Al-Nizariyeh Gate in the Qusayr area,” state television said, with official news agency SANA reporting damage in the attacks.
The defense ministry said “the Israeli enemy launched an air aggression from the direction of Lebanese territory, targeting crossing points that it had previously hit” between the two countries.
The attacks “injured two civilians and caused material losses,” it added.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, based in Britain, said the attacks had “killed two Syrians working with Hezbollah and injured five others,” giving a preliminary toll.
Earlier, the monitor with a network of sources in Syria had said the “Israeli strikes targeted” an official land border crossing in the Qusayr area and six bridges on the Orontes River near the border with Lebanon.
Since September, Israel has bombed land crossings between Lebanon and Syria, putting them out of service. It accuses Hezbollah of using the routes, key for people fleeing the war in Lebanon, to transfer weapons from Syria.
Iraqis sentenced to prison in $2.5bn corruption case
- A criminal court in Baghdad specializing in corruption cases issued the prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years, a statement from Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said
BAGHDAD: An Iraqi court on Monday sentenced to prison former senior officials, a businessman and others for involvement in the theft of $2.5 billion in public funds — one of Iraq’s biggest corruption cases.
The three most high-profile individuals sentenced — businessman Nour Zuhair, as well as former prime minister Mustafa Al-Kadhemi’s cabinet director Raed Jouhi and a former adviser, Haitham Al-Juburi — are on the run and were tried in absentia.
The scandal, dubbed the “heist of the century,” has sparked widespread anger in Iraq, which is ravaged by rampant corruption, unemployment and decaying infrastructure after decades of conflict.
A criminal court in Baghdad specializing in corruption cases issued the prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years, a statement from Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said.
Thirteen people received sentences on Monday, according to member of Parliament Mostafa Sanad.
Most of them, 10, are from Iraq’s tax authority and include its former director and deputy, he added on his Telegram channel.
Iraq revealed two years ago that at least $2.5 billion was stolen between September 2021 and August 2022 through 247 cheques that were cashed by five companies.
The money was then withdrawn in cash from the accounts of those firms.
A judicial source told AFP that some tax officials charged were in detention, without detailing how many.
Businessman Zuhair was sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to the judiciary statement.
He was arrested at Baghdad airport in October 2022 as he was trying to leave the country, but released on bail a month later after giving back more than $125 million and pledging to return the rest in instalments.
The wealthy businessman was back in the news in August after he reportedly had a car crash in Lebanon, following an interview he gave to an Iraqi news channel.
Juburi, the former prime ministerial adviser, received a three-year prison sentence. He also returned $2.6 million before disappearing, a judicial source told AFP.
Kadhemi’s cabinet director Raed Jouhi, also currently outside Iraq, was sentenced to six years in prison — alongside “a number of officials involved in the crime,” according to the judiciary’s statement.
Corruption is rampant across Iraq’s public institutions, but convictions typically target mid-level officials or minor players and rarely those at the top of the power hierarchy.
11 killed in Kurdish-led attacks in north Syria: war monitor
- Seven Turkiye-backed militants were also killed in the attack and in an operation by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces that control swathes of northeast Syria.
BEIRUT: The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Monday 11 people including civilians were killed in attacks by a Kurdish-led force on positions of Turkiye-backed militants in north Syria.
“A woman, her two children and a man were killed... in the bombing of a military position... used by Ankara-backed factions for human smuggling operations to Turkiye,” the Britain-based monitor said.
It said seven Turkiye-backed militants were also killed in that incident and in an operation by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that control swathes of northeast Syria.
SDF special forces infiltrated a Turkiye-backed group’s military position and killed three militants, said the monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.
The SDF also booby-trapped a military position as they withdrew, in an attack that killed another four pro-Turkiye militants but also four civilians including a woman and her two children, the Observatory said.
On Sunday, 15 Ankara-backed Syrian militants were killed after the SDF infiltrated their territory, the monitor reported earlier.
The SDF is a US-backed force that spearheaded the fighting against the Daesh group in its last Syria strongholds before its territorial defeat in 2019.
It is dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), viewed by Ankara as an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Turkish troops and allied armed factions control swathes of northern Syria following successive cross-border offensives since 2016, most of them targeting the SDF.
