GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Israeli forces bombed and battled Hamas in Gaza City on Wednesday as tens of thousands of Palestinians scrambled for a safe haven after the army issued an evacuation order for a vast swathe in the territory’s south.
Apache helicopters and Israeli quadcopter drones flew above Gaza City’s Shujaiya district as heavy gunfire echoed through the streets, said AFP reporters.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a US media report saying his generals were urging a Gaza truce even with Hamas undefeated, stressing on Tuesday that “this will not happen.”
Military chief Herzi Halevi meanwhile said Israel is engaged in “a long campaign” to destroy Hamas over the October 7 attack and to bring home the hostages held by Palestinian militants.
The United Nations warned that the almost nine-months-old war had “unleashed a maelstrom of human misery” and that the latest evacuation order had plunged yet more Palestinians into “an abyss of suffering.”
Ten days after Netanyahu said the war’s “intense phase” was winding down, the Israeli military again rained down air strikes and artillery fire on militants in the Shujaiya district.
The air force struck “over 50 terror infrastructure sites” across Gaza in 24 hours while ground troops “eliminated terrorists,” located tunnels and found weapons including AK-47 assault rifles, the military said.
The Israeli army — which issued an evacuation order for Shujaiya a week ago — on Sunday did the same for a larger area near Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south, raising fears of renewed heavy battles there.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have again taken to the road there, many bundling their scant belongings on top of cars or donkey carts as they sought safety elsewhere in the bombed-out wasteland.
The UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said 250,000 people had been impacted by the latest evacuation order that covers southern areas bordering Israel and Egypt.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the order covers 117 square kilometers (45 square miles), or “about a third of the Gaza Strip, making it the largest such order since October.”
The UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, told the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday that the war had now displaced 80 percent of Gaza’s population.
She also said not enough aid was reaching the besieged territory and that crossings must be reopened, particularly to southern Gaza, to avert a humanitarian disaster.
“Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been plunged into an abyss of suffering, their home lives shattered, their lives upended,” she said. “The war has not merely created the most profound of humanitarian crises. It has unleashed a maelstrom of human misery.”
Amid the war, siege and mass displacement, more than 150,000 people have contracted skin diseases in the squalid conditions, said the World Health Organization.
Wafaa Elwan, a Palestinian mother of seven who now lives in a tent city by the sea, said: “We sleep on the ground, on sand where worms come out underneath us.”
She said her five-year-old son, much of whose body was covered in rashes and welts, “can’t sleep through the night because he can’t stop scratching his body.”
The bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive since then has killed at least 37,925 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
The Israeli military said Wednesday that “operational activities continue throughout the Gaza Strip.”
The Gaza civil defense agency said seven people were killed when a strike hit a family house north of Gaza City.
Another strike killed three people in a car at Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Deir Al-Balah area, said an AFP reporter.
Air strikes also hit homes in Rafah, according to Gaza’s government media office.
The New York Times has quoted Israeli security officials as saying top generals see a truce as the best way to secure the release of the remaining hostages, even if that meant not achieving all of the war goals.
Netanyahu, who heads a government including hard-line right-wing parties, strongly rejected this on Tuesday and vowed Israel would not give in to the “winds of defeatism.”
“The war will end once Israel achieves all of its objectives, including the destruction of Hamas and the release of all of our hostages,” he said.
Heavy fighting rocks Gaza as thousands on the move again
https://arab.news/4hkcr
Heavy fighting rocks Gaza as thousands on the move again
- Apache helicopters and Israeli quadcopter drones flew above Gaza City’s Shujaiya district as heavy gunfire echoed through the streets
- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a US media report saying his generals were urging a Gaza truce even with Hamas undefeated
UAE president receives call from Syria’s new leader
- Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan affirmed that the UAE supports the Syrian people’s aspirations for security and peace
LONDON: UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan received a call from Ahmed Al-Sharaa, the leader of the new Syrian administration, on Sunday.
During the call, both sides discussed ways to enhance relations between the two countries in areas of mutual interest.
Sheikh Mohamed emphasized the UAE’s unwavering support for Syria’s independence and sovereignty over its territory, the Emirates News Agency reported.
The UAE supports the Syrian people’s aspirations for security, peace, and a dignified life, he added.
Syria destroys millions of captagon pills, other drugs
- Officials find100 million pills of the amphetamine-like stimulant captagon
- Production and trafficking of the drug flourished under ousted President Bashar Assad
DAMASCUS: Syrian security forces destroyed seized drugs Sunday including around 100 million pills of the amphetamine-like stimulant captagon — whose production and trafficking flourished under ousted president Bashar Assad, an official said.
A 2022 AFP investigation found that Syria under Assad had become a narco state, with the $10-billion captagon industry dwarfing all other exports and funding both his regime and many of his enemies.
“We destroyed large quantities of narcotic pills,” said official Badr Youssef, including “about 100 million captagon pills and 10 to 15 tons of hashish” as well as raw materials used to produce captagon.
He spoke from the Damascus headquarters of the defunct Fourth Division where the drugs were seized. The Fourth Division, a notorious branch of the Syrian army, was controlled by Assad’s brother Maher.
The official SANA news agency said “the anti-narcotics department of the (interior) ministry is destroying narcotic substances seized at the headquarters of the Fourth Division.”
An AFP photographer saw security personnel in a Fourth Division warehouse load dozens of bags filled with pills and other drugs into trucks, before taking them to a field to be burned.
On December 8, Islamist-led rebels ousted Assad after a lightning offensive that lasted less than two weeks. The army and Assad’s security apparatus collapsed as the new authorities seized control of Damascus.
On Saturday, SANA reported that authorities had seized “a huge warehouse belonging to the former regime” in the coastal city of Latakia. It said the factory “specialized in packing captagon pills into children’s toys and furniture.”
On Sunday, an AFP photographer visited the warehouse near the port and saw security personnel dismantling children’s bicycles that contained the small white pills.
Captagon pills had also been hidden inside objects such as doors, shisha water pipes and car parts, he reported.
Abu Rayyan, a security official in Latakia, said that “about 50 to 60 million captagon pills” had been seized that “belonged to the Fourth Division.”
“This is the largest such warehouse in the area,” he said.
Abu Rayyan said the drugs had been packed for export from Latakia “to neighboring countries,” and that they would be destroyed.
Syrian defense minister rejects Kurdish proposal for its own military bloc
- Defense minister aims to bring anti-Assad factions into unified command
- Kurdish SDF has proposed retaining own bloc in armed forces
DAMASCUS: Syria’s new defense minister said on Sunday it would not be right for US-backed Kurdish fighters based in the country’s northeast to retain their own bloc within the broader integrated Syrian armed forces.
Speaking to Reuters at the Defense Ministry in Damascus, Murhaf Abu Qasra said the leadership of the Kurdish fighters, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was procrastinating in its handling of the complex issue.
The SDF, which has carved out a semi-autonomous zone through 14 years of civil war, has been in talks with the new administration in Damascus led by former rebels who toppled President Bashar Assad on Dec. 8.
SDF commander Mazloum Abdi has said one of their central demands is a decentralized administration, saying in an interview with Saudi Arabia’s Asharq News channel last week that the SDF was open to integrating with the Defense Ministry but as “a military bloc,” and without dissolving.
Abu Qasra rejected that proposal on Sunday.
“We say that they would enter the Defense Ministry within the hierarchy of the Defense Ministry, and be distributed in a military way — we have no issue there,” said Abu Qasra, who was appointed defense minister on Dec. 21.
“But for them to remain a military bloc within the Defense Ministry, such a bloc within a big institution is not right.”
One of the minister’s priorities since taking office has been integrating Syria’s myriad anti-Assad factions into a unified command structure.
But doing so with the SDF has proved challenging. The US considers the group a key ally against Daesh militants, but neighboring Turkiye regards it as a national security threat.
Abu Qasra said he had met the SDF’s leaders but accused them of “procrastinating” in talks over their integration, and said incorporating them in the Defense Ministry like other ex-rebel factions was “a right of the Syrian state.”
Abu Qasra was appointed to the transitional government about two weeks after Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, the Islamist group to which he belongs, led the offensive that ousted Assad.
He said he hoped to finish the integration process, including appointing some senior military figures, by March 1, when the transitional government’s time in power is set to end.
Asked how he responded to criticism that a transitional council should not make such appointments or carry out such sweeping changes of the military infrastructure, he said “security issues” had prompted the new state to prioritize the matter.
“We are in a race against time and every day makes a difference,” he said.
The new administration was also criticized over its decision to give some foreigners, including Egyptians and Jordanians, ranks in the new military.
Abu Qasra acknowledged the decision had created a firestorm but said he was not aware of any requests to extradite any of the foreign fighters.
Aid trucks arrive at Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing ahead of Gaza entry, two sources say
CAIRO: About 200 aid delivery trucks, including 20 carrying fuel, began arriving on Sunday at the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing ahead of entry into the Gaza Strip, two Egyptian sources told Reuters.
A ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza took effect on Sunday morning after a nearly three-hour delay, pausing a 15-month-old war that has shaken up the Middle East.
The aid trucks were using the Kerem Shalom entry point pending completion of maintenance at the Rafah border crossing into southern Gaza from Egypt, the sources said.
Israeli hardline minister Ben-Gvir quits government over Gaza deal
- The Otzma Yehudit party is no longer part of the ruling coalition
JERUSALEM: Hardline Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and two other ministers from his nationalist-religious party have resigned from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet over the Gaza ceasefire deal, their party said on Sunday.
The Otzma Yehudit party is no longer part of the ruling coalition but has said it will not try to bring down Netanyahu’s government.
In a statement, it called the ceasefire deal a “capitulation to Hamas” and denounced what it called the “release of hundreds of murderers” and the “renouncing of the (Israeli military’s) achievements in the war” in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retains a slim majority in the Israeli parliament despite their resignation.
