PORT SUDAN: Torrential flooding battered Sudan’s southeast Tuesday, bringing entire villages underwater and causing homes to collapse, witnesses told AFP, in the first devastating weather event of Sudan’s rainy season.
In Aroma, a town some 60 kilometers (37 miles) north of the major city of Kassala, residents were “shocked this morning by the sudden water” after the collapse of a dirt barrier that functioned as a makeshift dam, local resident Ibrahim Issa told AFP over the phone.
The flooding, which usually occurs in the area later in the summer, follows increased rainfall in neighboring Eritrea, feeding the Gash River.
Also known as the Mareb River, the waterway flows out of Eritrea and annually inundates the flat delta in eastern Sudan, just north of the Kassala state capital.
“Now everything in my house is completely underwater, I only managed to get my children out,” Issa said.
By early afternoon, the waters had submerged large parts of Aroma as well as three nearby villages, according to a humanitarian worker in the area.
“The water is still coming,” the worker told AFP, requesting anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
Photos shared on social media showed residents wading through thigh-level brown water.
AFP could not immediately verify the scale of the damage wrought by the flooding.
Each year, torrential rains and river flooding — which peak in August — destroy homes, wreck infrastructure and claim lives, both directly and indirectly through water-borne diseases.
The damage is expected to be much worse this year, after nearly 15 months of war that have decimated the country’s already fragile infrastructure and pushed millions of displaced people into flood zones.
The World Meteorological Organization has predicted “above-normal rainfall” over most of the Greater Horn of Africa region this summer, which could spell disaster for Sudan’s already flood-prone areas.
East African bloc IGAD’s climate predictions chief, Guleid Artan, has warned of exceptionally high risk of flooding in both Sudan and South Sudan.
Aid groups have repeatedly warned that humanitarian access, already hampered by both rival forces, will be made nearly impossible as the waters isolate remote areas.
Sudan is already facing what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory, as fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces shows no signs of abating.
A record 10.5 million people are currently displaced across the country, which has for months teetered on the brink of all-out famine.
Floods tear through delta in war-torn Sudan’s southeast
https://arab.news/zdqzr
Floods tear through delta in war-torn Sudan’s southeast
- Residents were “shocked this morning by the sudden water” after the collapse of a dirt barrier that functioned as a makeshift dam
- The flooding, which usually occurs in the area later in the summer, follows increased rainfall in neighboring Eritrea, feeding the Gash River
Ancient secrets unearthed in vast Turkish cave city
- Historian traces the city’s ancient beginnings to the reign of King Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 883 to 859 BC
- The region where the cave city is located was once known as Mesopotamia, recognized as the cradle of some of the earliest civilizations in the world
Archaeologists stumbled upon the city-under-a-city “almost by chance” after an excavation of house cellars in Midyat, near the Syrian border, led to the discovery of a vast labyrinth of caves in 2020.
Workers have already cleared more than 50 subterranean rooms, all connected by 120 meters of tunnel carved out of the rock.
But that is only a fraction of the site’s estimated 900,000-square-meter area, which would make it the largest underground city in Turkiye’s southern Anatolia region.
“Maybe even in the world,” said Midyat conservation director Mervan Yavuz who oversaw the excavation.
“To protect themselves from the climate, enemies, predators and diseases, people took refuge in these caves which they turned into an actual city,” Yavuz added.
The art historian traces the city’s ancient beginnings to the reign of King Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 883 to 859 BC.
At its height in the seventh century BC, the empire stretched from The Gulf in the east to Egypt in the west.
Referred to as Matiate in that period, the city’s original entrance required people to bend in half and squeeze themselves into a circular opening.
It was this entrance that first gave the Midyat municipality an inkling of its subterranean counterpart’s existence.
“We actually suspected that it existed,” Yavuz recounted as he walked through the cave’s gloom.
“In the 1970s, the ground collapsed and a construction machine fell down. But at the time we didn’t try to find out more, we just strengthened and closed up the hole.”
The region where the cave city is located was once known as Mesopotamia, recognized as the cradle of some of the earliest civilizations in the world.
Many major empires conquered or passed through these lands, which may have given those living around Matiate a reason to take refuge underground.
“Before the arrival of the Arabs, these lands were fiercely disputed by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans and then the Byzantines,” said Ekrem Akman, a historian at the nearby University of Mardin.
Yavuz noted that “Christians from the Hatay region, fleeing from the persecution of the Roman Empire... built monasteries in the mountains to avoid their attacks.”
He suspects that Jews and Christians may have used Matiate as a hiding place to practice their then-banned religions underground.
He pointed to the inscrutable stylized carvings — a horse, an eight-point star, a hand, trees — which adorn the walls, as well as a stone slab on the floor of one room that may have been used for celebrations or for sacrifices.
As a result of the city’s long continuous occupation, he said it was “difficult to pinpoint” exactly what at the site can be attributed to which period or group.
But “pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, all these believers contributed to the underground city of Matiate,” Yavuz said.
Even after the threat of centuries of invasions had passed, the caves stayed in use, said curator Gani Tarkan.
He used to work as a director at the Mardin Museum, where household items, bronzes and potteries recovered from the caves are on display.
“People continued to use this place as a living space,” Tarkan said.
“Some rooms were used as catacombs, others as storage space,” he added.
Excavation leader Yavuz pointed to a series of round holes dug to hold wine-filled amphorae vessels in the gloomy cool, out of the glaring sunlight above.
To this day, the Mardin region’s Orthodox Christian community maintains that old tradition of wine production.
Turkiye is also famous for its ancient cave villages in Cappadocia in the center of the country.
But while Cappadocia’s underground cities are built with rooms vertically stacked on top of each other, Matiate spreads out horizontally, Tarkan explained.
The municipality of Midyat, which funds the works, plans to continue the excavation until the site can be opened to the public.
It hopes the site will prove a popular tourist attraction and attract visitors to the city of 120,000.
Hamas leader in West Bank dies in Israeli custody
- Mustafa Muhammad Abu Ara died after being moved from a prison in southern Israel to a hospital
- Abu Ara was arrested in October while suffering severe health problems
JERUSALEM: A Hamas leader in the West Bank died in Israeli custody, Palestinian authorities and the militant group said Friday.
Mustafa Muhammad Abu Ara, 63, died after being moved from a prison in southern Israel to a hospital, according to a joint statement by the Palestinian Authority’s prisoners affairs body and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club watchdog.
“We mourn the passing of the leader and prisoner Sheikh Mustafa Muhammad Abu Ara and hold the occupation responsible for his assassination through deliberate medical neglect,” Hamas said in a statement.
Abu Ara was arrested in October while suffering severe health problems, the Palestinian body and the watchdog said.
During his detainment he was subjected to torture and starvation, they added.
Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Palestinian authorities accused Israel this month of waging an abusive “war of revenge” against Palestinian detainees since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
At the time, the Israeli military said it “rejects outright allegations concerning systematic abuse of detainees,” adding that it acts within international law.
Israel’s Netanyahu will meet Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, mending a years-long rift
- Relations between the two broke down after Netanyahu rapidly congratulated Joe Biden on his 2020 presidential victory
WASHINGTON: As president, Donald Trump went well beyond his predecessors in fulfilling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top wishes from the United States. Yet by the time Trump left the White House, relations between the two had broken down after Netanyahu rapidly congratulated Joe Biden on his 2020 presidential victory.
On Friday, the two men will meet face-to-face for the first time in nearly four years in a test of whether the relationship can be mended. Both have an interest in getting past their differences.
For Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, the meeting could cast him as an ally and statesman, as well as sharpen efforts by Republicans to portray themselves as the party most loyal to Israel.
That’s as divisions among Americans over US support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza open cracks in what has been decades of strong bipartisan backing for Israel, the biggest recipient of US aid.
For Netanyahu, who was in the United States to address Congress and meet with Biden, repairing relations with Trump is imperative given the prospect that he may once again become president of the United States, Israel’s main arms supplier and protector.
For both men, Friday’s meeting at Mar-a-Lago will highlight for their home audiences their depiction of themselves as strong leaders who have gotten big things done on the world stage, and can again.
One political gamble for Netanyahu is whether he could get more of the terms he wants in any deal on a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release, and in his much hoped-for closing of a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, if he waits out the Biden administration in hopes that Trump wins.
“Benjamin Netanyahu has spent much of his career in the last two decades in tethering himself to the Republican Party,” said Aaron David Miller, a former US diplomat for Arab-Israeli negotiations, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
For the next six months, that means “mending ties with an irascible, angry president,” Miller said, meaning Trump.
Trump broke off with Netanyahu in early 2021. That was after the Israeli prime minister became one of the first world leaders to congratulate Biden for his presidential election victory, disregarding Trump’s false claim he had won.
“Bibi could have stayed quiet,” Trump said in an interview with an Israel newspaper back then. “He made a terrible mistake.”
Netanyahu and Trump last met at a September 2020 White House signing ceremony for the signature diplomatic achievement of both men’s political careers. It was an accord brokered by the Trump administration in which the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain agreed to establish normal diplomatic relations with Israel.
For Israel, it amounted to the two countries formally recognizing it for the first time. It was a major step in what Israel hopes will be an easing of tensions and a broadening of economic ties with its Arab neighbors.
In public postings and statements after his break with Netanyahu, Trump portrayed himself as having stuck his neck out for Israel as president, and Netanyahu paying him back with disloyalty.
He also has criticized Netanyahu on other points, faulting him as “not prepared” for the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that started the war in Gaza, for example.
In his high-profile speech to Congress on Wednesday, Netanyahu gave recognition to Biden, who has kept up military and diplomatic support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza despite opposition from within his Democratic Party.
But Netanyahu poured praise on Trump, calling the regional accords Trump helped broker historic and thanking him “for all the things he did for Israel.”
Netanyahu listed actions by the Trump administration long-sought by Israeli governments — the US officially saying Israel had sovereignty over the Golan Heights, captured from Syria during a 1967 war; a tougher US policy toward Iran; and Trump declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, breaking with longstanding US policy that Jerusalem’s status should be decided in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
“I appreciated that,” Trump told “Fox & Friends” on Thursday, referring to Netanyahu’s praise.
He didn’t quiet his criticism, however, of Israel’s conduct of the war, which has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians.
“I want him to finish up and get it done quickly. You gotta get it done quickly, because they are getting decimated with his publicity,” Trump said in Thursday’s interview.
“Israel is not very good at public relations, I’ll tell you that,” he added.
Palestinian and Jewish protesters stage rare peace march
TEL AVIV: Chanting “yes, to peace, yes, to a deal,” hundreds of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis marched noisily through Tel Aviv on Thursday night, demanding an end to the war in Gaza and the cycle of violence.
Their agenda starts with a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, but ultimately, they want to reboot Palestinian-Israeli relations, and breathe new life into the moribund peace movement.
“It basically went silent after October 7,” and the start of the war, Amira Mohammed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said of the peace camp.
“The radicals became louder than the peace movement. So right now, we’ve got to be radical about the peace that we want.”
Mohammed said that included an “acknowledgement of the power dynamic between occupier and occupied” as well as “accountability on both sides.”
“We can’t stop violence with more violence,” said teacher Carmit Bar Levy, 49.
“We need to ensure a good life for both Palestinians and Jews inside of Israel. We have to acknowledge they have the same right to live here as us.”
She said there was a growing sense since the outbreak of the war that the status quo could not hold.
“Peace is the only way forward,” said Marcelo Oliki, 64, a survivor of the Hamas-attacks on Kibbutz Nirim.
“There are children, women and babies dying just across the border from me. There are people there who are grieving too, just like me, and that want peace, too, like me.”
As the war grinds on, demonstrations have erupted in Israel’s largest city multiple times a week, some staged by families of the hostages in Gaza, some held by anti-government demonstrators active before the war, and others by the Jewish-Arab peace camp.
About 20 percent of Israel’s 9.5 million inhabitants are Arab, and many of whom identify as Palestinian.
According to activists and watchdogs, Palestinian citizens of Israel have struggled to get authorization for anti-war protests. Thursday’s march was postponed a week after organizers said permission was abruptly withdrawn.
While Tel Aviv’s various protest groups may diverge on politics, they overlap in the call for an immediate ceasefire.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his insistence on “total victory” while addressing the US Congress on Wednesday, while at home, members of his far-right coalition have threatened to collapse the government over any deal with Hamas.
The Hamas attack that started the war on October 7 resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 39,175 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
“We have to remember that peace is an option, we don’t have to convince the far-right... we just need to convince the people in the middle who don’t want any more war,” said Maya Ofer, 23, a student and member of activist group Standing Together, which organized the march.
The group’s co-director Rula Daoud addressed a crowd waving signs reading “peace now” and “war has no winner.”
The demonstrators insisted their vision for long-term political solutions stemmed not from idealism but deep pragmatism.
“Two peoples live in this country, and neither of them is going anywhere,” Daoud said.
Israel seeks changes to Gaza truce plan, complicating talks, sources say
- Israel wants to screen Palestinians returning to Gaza’s north, but Hamas rejects demand
- Egypt also rejects Israeli demand to retain control over its border with Gaza, sources say
WASHINGTON/CAIRO: Israel is seeking changes to a plan for a Gaza truce and the release of hostages by Hamas, complicating a final deal to halt nine months of combat that have devastated the enclave, according to a Western official and a Palestinian and two Egyptian sources.
Israel says that displaced Palestinians should be screened as they return to the enclave’s north when the ceasefire begins, retreating from an agreement to allow civilians who fled south to freely return home, the four sources told Reuters.
Israeli negotiators “want a vetting mechanism for civilian populations returning to the north of Gaza, where they fear these populations could support” Hamas fighters who remain entrenched there, said the Western official.
The Palestinian militant group rejected the new Israeli demand, according to the Palestinian and Egyptian sources.
Another sticking point, the Egyptian sources said, was over Israel’s demand to retain control of Gaza’s border with Egypt, which Cairo dismissed as outside a framework for a final deal accepted by the foes.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, the White House and Egypt’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Israel’s demands.
“Netanyahu is still stalling. There is no change in his stance so far,” said Hamas senior official Sami Abu Zuhri, who did not comment directly on Israel’s demands.
Word of the new sticking points came as US President Joe Biden pressed for a ceasefire in talks in Washington on Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on reaching a final deal.
“We are closer now than we’ve been before,” said White House national security spokesperson John Kirby, adding that gaps remained.
In a speech to the US Congress on Wednesday, Netanyahu said that Israel was engaged “in intense efforts” to secure the release of hostages held in Gaza.
The sources who spoke to Reuters requested anonymity to discuss Israeli demands because of the delicacy of the on-off talks to finalize a truce and the release of hostages seized in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 assault on Israel that triggered the Gaza war.
The attackers killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 captives, according to Israeli tallies. Some 120 hostages are still being held, though Israel believes a third of them are dead.
Gaza health authorities say more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed and most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people displaced by fighting that has destroyed much of the enclave and created a humanitarian disaster.
The United States, Qatar and Egypt have been mediating indirect talks between Israel and Hamas centered on a framework based on an Israeli offer and promoted by US President Joe Biden, who has pressed the sides to resolve their remaining differences.
The framework calls for three phases, with the first seeing a six-week ceasefire and the release of women, elderly and wounded hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Talks on the second phase — which Biden calls “a permanent end to hostilities” — would continue in the first phase. Major reconstruction would begin in the third phase.
Sticking points
US officials have said for weeks that a deal was close but that hurdles remained.
Israeli officials raised their demand for a mechanism to vet civilians returning to Gaza’s north at the last negotiating session in Cairo earlier this month, said the Western and Egyptian sources. This “wasn’t expected,” the Western official said.
Israel is concerned not only about Hamas fighters slipping back north, but “operatives” among civilians who provide covert support to the group that governs Gaza, the official said.
The Israelis, the official and the three other sources said, also balked at withdrawing their forces from a nine-mile (14 km) strip of land along the border with Egypt referred to by Israel as the Philadelphi corridor.
The Israel Defense Forces seized the strip in May, saying that the strategic swath hosts smuggling tunnels through which Hamas has received weapons and other supplies. Egypt says it destroyed tunnel networks leading to Gaza years ago and created a buffer zone and border fortifications that prevent smuggling.
The last several days have seen efforts to “work around” that issue, either through an Israeli withdrawal “or there could be some understanding about how that is managed,” said the Western official, who did not elaborate.
A senior Biden administration official, briefing reporters on Wednesday ahead of Netanyahu’s meeting with the US president, said they were in the final stages of securing a deal.
“There are some things we need from Hamas, and there are some things we need from the Israeli side. And I think you’ll see that play out here over the course of the coming week,” the official said.
Among things needed from Hamas were “the hostages who are going to come out,” the official added without elaborating.
Zuhri rejected the assertion, saying, “The US administration is trying to cover up for Netanyahu’s undermining of the deal by saying there are things demanded from the two sides. This isn’t true.”
