Can Israeli PM Netanyahu achieve his stated war objectives with Rafah assault?

For the Netanyahu government, however, Rafah represents a last opportunity to declare the war won and, in the process, to ensure Netanyahu has a political future. (AFP). (AP)
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Updated 13 May 2024
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Can Israeli PM Netanyahu achieve his stated war objectives with Rafah assault?

  • Despite claim there are four brigades in Rafah, it is unclear how many operational fighters Hamas still has
  • Some Israeli analysts say Israel needs to make Hamas ideologically and politically irrelevant, not do the opposite

LONDON: This week, before-and-after imagery released by US commercial satellite company Planet Labs showed the extent of the damage inflicted in just one day by Israeli forces on the outskirts of Rafah, close to the Egyptian border.

This is not the city of Rafah itself — yet. Awaiting a resolution of the political standoff between their government and the US, which has threatened to stop supplying ammunition if Israel invades Rafah, the 98th Airborne and the 162nd Armored divisions are massing to the south of the city.

In the satellite imagery captured on Tuesday, groups of tanks can be seen in the vicinity of the Rafah crossing, which Israeli troops occupied and closed on Monday, and grouped in several other strategic locations.

While they are waiting, however, they have been laying waste to much of the surrounding infrastructure and indulging in some symbolic wanton vandalism: in a video released on Tuesday a tank rolls over a “I love Gaza” sign near the crossing.




Netanyahu has gambled his political future on two objectives tied to a continuation of the devastating and murderous assault on Gaza — the destruction of Hamas and the killing of its top commanders. (AFP)

The contrast between the satellite images taken on Monday and Tuesday is striking. In the course of one day, hundreds of homes, commercial buildings, agricultural plots and other structures on dozens of sites either side of the Salah Al-Din highway were destroyed.

“This,” said a spokesman for the Israeli government on Tuesday, “is the beginning of our mission to take out the last four Hamas brigades in Rafah.”

But although Netanyahu has gambled his political future on two objectives tied to a continuation of the devastating and murderous assault on Gaza — the destruction of Hamas and the killing of its top commanders — after seven months of all-out warfare those objectives seem increasingly unattainable.

Despite the Israeli claim that there are four brigades in Rafah, it is unclear exactly how many operational fighters Hamas still has, or exactly where they are. It is also not clear if they have chosen, as some commentators have suggested, to make a “last stand” in Rafah, or even, after seven months of war, if they have the weapons and ammunition necessary to do so.




Groups of tanks were seen in the vicinity of the Rafah crossing. (AFP)

Even less certain is the location of Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar, from whom nothing has been heard since the invasion of Gaza began.

Sinwar, Israel’s public enemy number one, has become a ghost, so much so that on Thursday US National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby made a public plea for him to “come clean about what his intentions are.”

Writing in The Spectator this week, Middle East analyst Jonathan Spyer suggested that, “contrary to what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might wish, Sinwar, his brother Mohammed, and the Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif are almost certainly not currently besieged in a bunker in Rafah, surrounded and obliged to either agree to the Egyptian (ceasefire) proposal or be crushed beneath the treads of the 98th and the 162nd.”

In fact, added Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum, “it is not even certain if the Hamas leaders and their hostages are even still in the Rafah area, or ... in some other part of the strip.”

Gaza, although barely larger than the small Mediterranean island of Malta, has nevertheless proved to be a frustrating landscape for Israeli operations.




“The only way to defeat the Hamas ideology is with a better ideology, and that is to make the two-state solution real to Palestinians,” said Gershon Baskin. (AFP)

On Thursday it emerged that even before the Oct. 7 attack, Israel had tried, and failed, to assassinate both Sinwar and Al-Deif, the commander-in-chief of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades.

In remarks made to a Jewish organization in the US and broadcast on Israeli television’s Channel 12, Israel’s former military chief of staff Aviv Kochavi said a perceived “change with Hamas” in 2021 had led to the decision to try to kill the two men.

“We tried, and it’s hard,” he was reported as having said.

“In a densely populated, heavily built-up area it is very hard. So, we had been working for months in order to procure the operation but we couldn’t.”

Kochavi also added his voice to the growing chorus in Israel critical of Netanyahu’s increasingly unpopular determination to continue military operations in Gaza.




Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s public enemy number one, has become a ghost. (AFP)

“I don’t think there is a way to bring back the hostages without halting for the time being the war,” he said. Furthermore, he added, “I don’t think we can achieve complete victory in months — forget it, it will take years.”

For the Netanyahu government, however, Rafah represents a stage for political theatre — a last opportunity to declare the war won and, in the process, to ensure Netanyahu has a political future.

INNUMBERS

• 120 People taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7 still unaccounted for.

• 252 Israelis and foreigners taken hostage in the attack, according to Israel.

• 80,000 People known to have fled Rafah since last Monday after Israeli warning.

“They're looking for a victory,” said Yossi Mekelberg, a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the Middle East and North Africa Program at London-based policy institute Chatham House.

“They are looking for a photo op: ‘Here is his head, we’ve cut off the head of Hamas, now it’s all over’.”

Although the message from Biden “is very clear — for the United States to even suggest imposing an arms ban on Israel is a huge thing,” Netanyahu is also facing a potential internal revolt by his right-wing cabinet members, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Givr and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who oppose any ceasefire with Hamas.




Despite the Israeli claim that there are four brigades in Rafah, it is unclear exactly how many operational fighters Hamas still has. (AFP)

Ultra-religious, “they are on a different planet,” said Mekelberg. “It’s not between them and other human beings, it's between them and God. And they are telling Netanyahu if he compromises too much with Hamas they will leave the government, and that there is no point in them staying in government if we don't enter Rafah.”

Whether they would find Sinwar there is anybody’s guess, says Gershon Baskin, a former adviser to Israeli, Palestinian and international prime ministers on the Middle East peace process.

“I'm sure that he's not just sitting and waiting,” he said. “He has certainly booby-trapped tunnels and bunkers in the whole area between Rafah and Khan Younis, and maybe they also have access to places north of there. We don’t know.”

But if Sinwar is in Rafah, “from my experience with the man there is no way he is going to surrender. He will fight to the death. I think that he believes that he will never survive this war. He’s not afraid of death. In fact, he believes that it’s his duty to become a martyr and he will try to kill as many Israelis along the way as possible.”




For the Netanyahu government, however, Rafah represents a stage for political theatre. (Reuters)

According to Baskin, an all-out ground attack on Rafah would be “catastrophic, for any hostages and the civilian population. There’s no doubt about it. I have heard there are about 40,000 people left in the quadrant that Israel said they wanted people to move out of, and you have another 1.2 million at least in the city of Rafah and its surroundings.”

Humanitarian considerations aside, Mekelberg believes that, even if Rafah is attacked and razed to the ground, Sinwar is killed and victory declared, assaulting the city would be a strategic mistake — and would not deliver the hoped-for existential blow to Hamas.

“The main threat to Israel from Hamas comes from its ideology and politics, not from its military,” he told Arab News.




The contrast between the satellite images taken on Monday and Tuesday is striking. (AFP/Maxar Technologies)

“The military you can deal with. But the Israelis need to convince people that this ideology doesn’t serve the Gazan people or Palestinian people generally, and that there is an alternative that offers hope, and it is doing very badly at that right now.

“Israel needs to make Hamas ideologically and politically irrelevant and it is doing exactly the opposite, making them more and more relevant.”

Baskin agrees.

“The only way to defeat the Hamas ideology is with a better ideology, and that is to make the two-state solution real to Palestinians, to show them that their fight, their struggle for independence and dignity, is on the road to victory,” he told Arab News.

That, he added, “is the only way to defeat Hamas” and, with the right leadership in Israel, and an alternative to Mahmoud Abbas for the Palestinians, doing so would be “easy.”

“All Israel has to do is declare that it recognizes the state of Palestine, and then every other country in the world would do that as well,” he said.




“The main threat to Israel from Hamas comes from its ideology and politics, not from its military,” Yossi Mekelberg told Arab News. (AFP)

“Then what I would do is organize a regional conference, including all of our neighbors, hoping that the Saudis would participate, and asking the Americans and Europeans to join in but not to run the show, and negotiate borders and Jerusalem and refugees and economic relations.”

The stumbling block to all this, he says, is Netanyahu, “who since 2009 has done everything he can to avoid the possibility of a two-state solution and for whom this war is definitely about his own personal political interest.”

 


MSF slams Gaza aid scheme as ‘slaughter masquerading’ as aid

Updated 3 sec ago
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MSF slams Gaza aid scheme as ‘slaughter masquerading’ as aid

GENEVA: Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) called on Friday for a controversial Israel- and US-backed relief effort in Gaza to be halted, branding it “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which began operating last month, “is degrading Palestinians by design, forcing them to choose between starvation or risking their lives for minimal supplies,” MSF said in a statement.
It said more than 500 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip while seeking food in recent weeks.
Starting in March, Israel blocked deliveries of food and other crucial supplies into Gaza for more than two months, leading to warnings of that the entire population of the occupied Palestinian territory is at risk of famine.
The United Nations says Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal under international law.
The densely populated Gaza Strip has been largely flattened by Israeli bombing since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.
Israel began allowing food supplies to trickle in at the end of May, using GHF — backed by armed US contractors, with Israeli troops on the perimeter — to run operations.
The latter have been marred by chaotic scenes and near-daily reports of Israeli forces firing on people desperate to get food.
There are also concerns about the neutrality of GHF, officially a private group with opaque funding.
The UN and major aid groups have refused to work with it, citing concerns it serves Israeli military goals and that it violates basic humanitarian principles.
The Gaza health ministry says that since late May, nearly 550 people have been killed near aid centers while seeking scarce food supplies.
“With over 500 people killed and nearly 4,000 wounded while seeking food, this scheme is slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid and must be immediately dismantled,” MSF said.
GHF has denied that fatal shootings have occurred in the immediate vicinity of its aid points.
On Tuesday, the United Nations condemned what it said was Israel’s “weaponization of food” in Gaza and called it a war crime.
MSF said the way GHF distributes food aid supplies “forces thousands of Palestinians, who have been starved by an over 100 day-long Israeli siege, to walk long distances to reach the four distribution sites and fight for scraps of food supplies.”
“These sites hinder women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities from accessing aid, and people are killed and wounded in the chaotic process,” it said.
Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, said the four sites were all under the full control of Israeli forces, surrounded by watch points and barbed wire.
“If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot. If they arrive on time but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot,” he said in the statement.
“If they arrive late, they shouldn’t be there because it is an ‘evacuated zone’ — they get shot.”
MSF said that its teams in Gaza were seeing patients every day who had been killed or wounded trying to get food at one of the sites.
It pointed to “a stark increase in the number of patients with gunshot wounds.”
MSF urged “the Israeli authorities and their allies to lift the siege on food, fuel, medical and humanitarian supplies and to revert to the pre-existing principled humanitarian system coordinated by the UN.”

Israeli strike kills 18 Palestinians in central Gaza

Updated 16 min 38 sec ago
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Israeli strike kills 18 Palestinians in central Gaza

  • Victims were among a crowd of people getting bags of flour from a Palestinian police unit in Deir Al-Balah
  • The strike was the latest violence surrounding the distribution of food to Gaza’s population

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: An Israeli strike hit a street in central Gaza on Thursday where witnesses said a crowd of people was getting bags of flour from a Palestinian police unit that had confiscated the goods from gangs looting aid convoys. Hospital officials said 18 people were killed.
The strike was the latest violence surrounding the distribution of food to Gaza’s population, which has been thrown into turmoil over the past month. After blocking all food for 2 1/2 months, Israel has allowed only a trickle of supplies into the territory since mid-May.
Efforts by the United Nations to distribute the food have been plagued by armed gangs looting trucks and by crowds of desperate people offloading supplies from convoys.
The strike in the central town of Deir Al-Balah on Thursday appeared to target members of Sahm, a security unit tasked with stopping looters and cracking down on merchants who sell stolen aid at high prices. The unit is part of Gaza’s Hamas-led Interior Ministry, but includes members of other factions.
Witnesses said the Sahm unit was distributing bags of flour and other goods confiscated from looters and corrupt merchants, drawing a crowd when the strike hit.
Video of the aftermath showed bodies, several torn, of multiple young men in the street with blood splattering on the pavement and walls of buildings. The dead included a child and at least seven Sahm members, according to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital where casualties were taken.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. Israel has accused the militant Hamas group of stealing aid and using it to prop up its rule in the enclave. Israeli forces have repeatedly struck Gaza’s police, considering them a branch of Hamas.
An association of Gaza’s influential clans and tribes said Wednesday they have started an independent effort to guard aid convoys to prevent looting. The National Gathering of Palestinian Clans and Tribes said it helped escort a rare shipment of flour that entered northern Gaza that evening.
It was unclear, however, if the association had coordinated with the UN or Israeli authorities. The World Food Program did not immediately respond to requests for comment by The Associated Press.
“We will no longer allow thieves to steal from the convoys for the merchants and force us to buy them for high prices,” Abu Ahmad Al-Gharbawi, a figure involved in the tribal effort, told the AP.
Accusations from Israel
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz in a joint statement Wednesday accused Hamas of stealing aid that is entering northern Gaza, and called on the Israeli military to plan to prevent it.
The National Gathering slammed the statement, saying the accusation of theft was aimed at justifying the Israeli military’s “aggressive practices.” It said aid was “fully secured” by the tribes, which it said were committed to delivering the supplies to the population.
The move by tribes to protect aid convoys brings yet another player in an aid situation that has become fragmented, confused and violent, even as Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinians struggle to feed their families.
Throughout the more than 20-month-old war, the UN led the massive aid operation by humanitarian groups providing food, shelter, medicine and other goods to Palestinians despite the fighting. UN and other aid groups say that when significant amounts of supplies are allowed into Gaza, looting and theft dwindles.
Israel, however, seeks to replace the UN-led system, saying Hamas has been siphoning off large amounts of supplies from it, a claim the UN and other aid groups deny.
Israel has backed an American private contractor, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has started distributing food boxes at four locations, mainly in the far south of Gaza for the past month.
Thousands of Palestinians walk for hours to reach the hubs, moving through Israeli military zones where witnesses say Israeli troops regularly open fire with heavy barrages to control the crowds.
Health officials say hundreds of people have been killed and wounded. The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots.
A trickle of aid
Israel has continued to allow a smaller number of aid trucks into Gaza for UN distribution. The World Health Organization said on Thursday it had been able to deliver its first medical shipment into Gaza since March 2, with nine trucks bringing blood, plasma and other supplies to Nasser Hospital, the biggest hospital still functioning in southern Gaza.
In Gaza City, large crowds gathered Thursday at an aid distribution point to receive bags of flour from the convoy that arrived the previous evening, according to photos taken by a cameraman collaborating with the AP.
Hiba Khalil, a mother of seven, said she can’t afford looted aid that is sold in markets for astronomical prices and was relieved to get flour for the first time in months.
“We’ve waited for months without having flour or eating much and our children would always cry,” she said.
Another woman, Umm Alaa Mekdad, said she hoped more convoys would make it through after struggling to deal with looters.
“The gangs used to take our shares and the shares of our children who slept hungry and thirsty,” she said.
Separately, Israeli strikes overnight and early Thursday killed at least 28 people across the Gaza Strip, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. More than 20 dead arrived at Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, while the bodies of eight others were taken to Nasser Hospital in the south.


Lebanon says 1 dead, 20 wounded in Israeli strikes in south

Updated 27 June 2025
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Lebanon says 1 dead, 20 wounded in Israeli strikes in south

  • “The Israel enemy strike on an apartment in Nabatiyeh led to a preliminary toll of one woman killed” and 13 other people wounded, the ministry said
  • An Israeli drone targeted the apartment

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s health ministry said a woman was killed and 20 other people were wounded in Israeli strikes Friday in the country’s south, as Israel’s military said some raids targeted Hezbollah sites.

Israel has kept up regular strikes on Lebanon, particularly in the south, since a November 27 ceasefire meant to end over a year of hostilities, including two months of all-out war that left Hezbollah severely weakened.

“The Israel enemy strike on an apartment in Nabatiyeh led to a preliminary toll of one woman killed” and 13 other people wounded, the ministry said in an updated statement carried by the official National News Agency.

The NNA said an Israeli drone targeted the apartment.

The agency earlier reported “a wave of successive heavy strikes” in several other areas in the Nabatiyeh region that the health ministry said wounded seven people.

An Israeli army statement said fighter jets struck a site that Hezbollah used “to manage its fire and defense array in the area of the Beaufort Ridge,” near Nabatiyeh and the Israel border.

It said the site was “part of a significant underground project that was completely taken out of use” by the raids.

The military said it “identified rehabilitation attempts made by Hezbollah beforehand and struck terror infrastructure sites in the area,” calling the actions “a blatant violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon.”

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in a statement condemned the strikes and said Israel continued “to disregard regional and international resolutions and calls to stop the violence and escalation in the region,” urging “effective action from the international community.”

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam in a statement called the strikes “a blatant violation of national sovereignty and the cessation of hostilities arrangements” and a threat to stability.

Under the ceasefire deal, Hezbollah was to pull its fighters back north of the Litani river, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Israeli border, leaving the Lebanese army and United Nations peacekeepers as the only armed parties in the area.

Israel was required to fully withdraw its troops from the country but has kept them in five locations in south Lebanon that it deems strategic.

In a letter to the United Nations requesting a one-year renewal of the mandate of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon which expires in August, the foreign ministry demanded “Israel’s withdrawal from all Lebanese territory it occupies and a stop to its ongoing violations.”

On Thursday, Israeli strikes on south Lebanon killed two people, with the Israeli military saying it targeted Hezbollah operatives.


Israeli court rejects Netanyahu’s call to postpone graft trial hearings

Updated 27 June 2025
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Israeli court rejects Netanyahu’s call to postpone graft trial hearings

JERUSALEM: An Israeli court on Friday rejected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request to postpone giving testimony in his corruption trial, after US President Donald Trump said the case should be canceled.

Netanyahu’s lawyer on Thursday asked the court to excuse the leader from hearings over the next two weeks, saying he needed to concentrate on “security issues” after Israel’s 12-day war with Iran.

The Jerusalem district court said in a judgment published online that “in its current form (his request) does not provide a basis or detailed justification for the cancelation of the hearings.”

Trump on Wednesday described the case against Netanyahu as a “witch hunt,” saying the trial “should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero.”

Netanyahu has thanked Trump for his support in Israel’s brief war against Iran, which ended with a ceasefire on June 24.

Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing and his supporters have described the long-running trial as politically motivated.

In a first case, he and his wife, Sara, are accused of accepting more than $260,000 worth of luxury goods such as cigars, jewelry and champagne from billionaires in exchange for political favors.

In two other cases, Netanyahu is accused of attempting to negotiate more favorable coverage from two Israeli media outlets.

During his current term since late 2022, Netanyahu’s government has proposed a series of far-reaching judicial reforms that critics say were designed to weaken the courts.

Netanyahu has requested multiple postponements in the trial since it began in May 2020, citing the war in Gaza which started in 2023, later fighting in Lebanon and this month the conflict with Iran.


‘She’s not coming back’: Alawite women snatched from streets of Syria

Updated 27 June 2025
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‘She’s not coming back’: Alawite women snatched from streets of Syria

  • Since March, social media has seen a steady stream of messages and video clips posted by families of missing Alawite women appealing for information about them, with new cases cropping up almost daily

DAMASCUS: “Don’t wait for her,” the WhatsApp caller told the family of Abeer Suleiman on May 21, hours after she vanished from the streets of the Syrian town of Safita. “She’s not coming back.”

Suleiman’s kidnapper and another man who identified himself as an intermediary said in subsequent calls and messages that the 29-year-old woman would be killed or trafficked into slavery unless her relatives paid them a ransom of $15,000.

“I am not in Syria,” Suleiman herself told her family in a call on May 29 from the same phone number used by her captor, which had an Iraqi country code. “All the accents around me are strange.”

Reuters reviewed the call, which the family recorded, along with about a dozen calls and messages sent by the abductor and intermediary, who had a Syrian phone number.

Suleiman is among at least 33 women and girls from Syria’s Alawite sect — aged between 16 and 39 — who have been abducted or gone missing this year in the turmoil following the fall of Bashar Assad, according to the families of all them.

The overthrow of the widely feared president in December after 14 years of civil war unleashed a furious backlash against the Muslim minority community to which he belongs, with armed factions affiliated to the current government turning on Alawite civilians in their coastal heartlands in March, killing hundreds of people.

Since March, social media has seen a steady stream of messages and video clips posted by families of missing Alawite women appealing for information about them, with new cases cropping up almost daily, according to a

Reuters review which found no online accounts of women from other sects vanishing.

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria told Reuters it is investigating the disappearances and alleged abductions of Alawite women following a spike in reports this year.

The commission, set up in 2011 to probe rights violations after the civil war broke out, will report to the UN Human Rights Council once the investigations are concluded, a spokesperson said.

Suleiman’s family borrowed from friends and neighbors to scrape together her $15,000 ransom, which they transferred to three money-transfer accounts in the Turkish city of Izmir on May 27 and 28 in 30 transfers ranging from $300 to $700, a close relative told Reuters, sharing the transaction receipts.

Once all money was delivered as instructed, the abductor and intermediary ceased all contact, with their phones turned off, the relative said. Suleiman’s family still have no idea what’s become of her.

Detailed interviews with the families of 16 of the missing women and girls found that seven of them are believed to have been kidnapped, with their relatives receiving demands for ransoms ranging from $1,500 to $100,000.

Three of the abductees — including Suleiman — sent their families text or voice messages saying they’d been taken out of the country.

There has been no word on the fate of the other nine. Eight of the 16 missing Alawites are under the age of 18, their families said.

Reuters reviewed about 20 text messages, calls and videos from the abductees and their alleged captors, as well as receipts of some ransom transfers, though it was unable to verify all parts of the families’ accounts or determine who might have targeted the women or their motives.

All 33 women disappeared in the governorates of Tartous, Latakia and Hama, which have large Alawite populations. Nearly half have since returned home, though all of the women and their families declined to comment about the circumstances, with most citing security fears.

Most of the families interviewed by Reuters said they felt police didn’t take their cases seriously when they reported their loved ones missing or abducted, and that authorities failed to investigate thoroughly.

The Syrian government didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.

Ahmed Mohammed Khair, a media officer for the governor of Tartous, dismissed any suggestion that Alawites were being targeted and said most cases of missing women were down to family disputes or personal reasons rather than abductions, without presenting evidence to support this.

“Women are either forced into marrying someone they won’t want to marry so they run away or sometimes they want to draw attention by disappearing,” he added and warned that “unverified allegations” could create panic and discord and destabilize security.

A media officer for Latakia governorate echoed Khair’s comments, saying that in many cases, women elope with their lovers and families fabricate abduction stories to avoid the social stigma.

The media officer of Hama governorate declined to comment.

A member of a fact-finding committee set up by new Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa to investigate the mass killings of Alawites in coastal areas in March, declined to comment on the cases of missing women.

Al-Sharaa denounced the sectarian bloodshed as a threat to his mission to unite the ravaged nation and has promised to punish those responsible, including those affiliated to the government if necessary.

Grabbed on her way to school
Syrian rights advocate Yamen Hussein, who has been tracking the disappearances of women this year, said most had taken place in the wake of the March violence. As far as he knew, only Alawites had been targeted and the perpetrators’ identities and motives remain unknown, he said.

He described a widespread feeling of fear among Alawites, who adhere to an offshoot of Shiite Islam and account for about a tenth of Syria’s predominantly Sunni population.

Some women and girls in Tartous, Latakia and Hama are staying away from school or college because they fear being targeted, Hussein said.

“For sure, we have a real issue here where Alawite women are being targeted with abductions,” he added. “Targeting women of the defeated party is a humiliation tactic that was used in the past by the Assad regime.”

Thousands of Alawites have been forced from their homes in Damascus, while many have been dismissed from their jobs and faced harassment at checkpoints from Sunni fighters affiliated to the government.

The interviews with families of missing women showed that most of them vanished in broad daylight, while running errands or traveling on public transport.
Zeinab Ghadir is among the youngest.

The 17-year-old was abducted on her way to school in the Latakia town of Al-Hanadi on February 27, according to a family member who said her suspected kidnapper contacted them by text message to warn them not to post images of the girl online.

“I don’t want to see a single picture or, I swear to God, I will send you her blood,” the man said in a text message sent from the girl’s phone on the same day she disappeared.

The teenage girl made a brief phone call home, saying she didn’t know where she had been taken and that she had stomach pain, before the line cut out, her relative said. The family has no idea what has happened to her.

Khozama Nayef was snatched on March 18 in rural Hama by a group of five men who drugged her to knock her out for a few hours while they spirited her away, a close relative told Reuters, citing the mother-of-five’s own testimony when she was returned.

The 35-year-old spent 15 days in captivity while her abductors negotiated with the family who eventually paid $1,500 dollars to secure her release, according to the family member who said when she returned home she had a mental breakdown.

Days after Nayef was taken, 29-year-old Doaa Abbas was seized on her doorstep by a group of attackers who dragged her into a car waiting outside and sped off, according to a family member who witnessed the abduction in the Hama town of Salhab.

The relative, who didn’t see how many men took Abbas or whether they were armed, said he tried to follow on his motorbike but lost sight of the car.

Three Alawites reported missing by their families on social media this year, who are not included in the 33 cases identified by Reuters, have since resurfaced and publicly denied they were abducted.

One of them, a 16-year-old girl from Latakia, released a video online saying she ran away of her own accord to marry a Sunni man. Her family contradicted her story though, telling Reuters that she had been abducted and forced to marry the man, and that security authorities had ordered her to say she had gone willingly to protect her kidnappers.

Reuters was unable to verify either account. A Syrian government spokesperson and Latakian authorities didn’t respond to queries about it.

The two other Alawites who resurfaced, a 23-year-old woman and a girl of 12, told Arabic TV channels that they had traveled of their own volition to the cities of Aleppo and Damascus, respectively, though the former said she ended up being beaten up by a man in an apartment before escaping.

Dark memories of Daesh
Syria’s Alawites dominated the country’s political and military elite for decades under the Assad dynasty. Bashar Assad’s sudden exit in December saw the ascendancy of a new government led by HTS, a Sunni group that emerged from an organization once affiliated to Al-Qaeda.

The new government is striving to integrate dozens of former rebel factions, including some foreign fighters, into its security forces to fill a vacuum left after the collapse of Assad’s defense apparatus.

Several of the families of misrsing women said they and many others in their community dreaded a nightmare scenario where Alawites suffered similar fates to those inflicted on the Yazidi religious minority by Daesh about a decade ago.

Daesh forced thousands of Yazidi women into sexual slavery during a reign of terror that saw its commanders claim a caliphate encompassing large parts of Iraq and Syria, according to the UN

A host of dire scenarios are torturing the minds of the family of Nagham Shadi, an Alawite woman who vanished this month, her father told Reuters.

The 23-year-old left their house in the village of al Bayadiyah in Hama on June 2 to buy milk and never came back, Shadi Aisha said, describing an agonizing wait for any word about the fate of his daughter.

Aisha said his family had been forced from their previous home in a nearby village on March 7 during the anti-Alawite violence.

“What do we do? We leave it to God.”