TEHRAN: Iran has condemned Israel’s deadly retaliatory strike on the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeidah in Yemen that the miltia say killed six people and wounded dozens more.
Late on Saturday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani “strongly condemned” the attack saying it was “an expression of the aggressive behavior of the child-killing Israeli regime.”
Israeli warplanes on Saturday struck the vital port of Hodeidah in response to a deadly drone attack by the Iran-backed Houthis on Tel Aviv, which killed one civilian.
The Houthis have since threatened a “huge” retaliation against Israel.
Kanani added that Israel and its supporters, including the United States, were “directly responsible for the dangerous and unpredictable consequences of the continued crimes in Gaza, as well as the attacks on Yemen.”
Regional tensions have soared since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, drawing in Iran-backed militant groups in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen.
Yemen’s Houthis, along with the Hezbollah group in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza are part of a Tehran-aligned “axis of resistance” against Israel and its allies.
The Islamic republic has reiterated support for the groups but insisted they were independent in their decision-making and actions.
Iran condemns Israeli attack on Yemen’s Hodeidah port
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Iran condemns Israeli attack on Yemen’s Hodeidah port
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- Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said the attack was “an expression of the aggressive behavior of the child-killing Israeli regime.”
Life returns to raided West Bank city as Israeli army withdraws
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- Days of destructive incursions by soldiers backed by armored vehicles and bulldozers
- Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and its forces regularly make incursions into Palestinian communities
JENIN, Palestinian Territories: The Israeli army withdrew from the city of Jenin and its refugee camp on Friday after a 10-day operation that left 36 dead across the occupied West Bank, witnesses said.
After days of destructive incursions by soldiers backed by armored vehicles and bulldozers, residents who had fled began returning to their homes in the camp, a bastion of Palestinian armed groups fighting against Israel, AFP journalists said.
On August 28, the army launched a military operation in several cities and towns of the northern West Bank including Jenin.
It said in a statement on Friday that Israeli forces “have been conducting counterterrorism activity in the area of Jenin,” without confirming a withdrawal.
“Israeli security forces are continuing to act in order to achieve the objectives of the counterterrorism operation,” the statement said.
Over the course of the operation in Jenin, Israeli forces killed 14 militants, arrested 30 suspects, dismantled “approximately 30 explosives planted under roads” and conducted four aerial strikes, the statement said.
One Israeli soldier was killed in Jenin, where most of the Palestinian fatalities have occurred.
Hamas, whose October 7 attack on southern Israel triggered the ongoing war in Gaza, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have said at least 14 of the dead were militants.
Aziz Taleb, a 48-year-old father of seven, returned to his family home of 20 years to find soldiers had raided it.
“Thank God (the children) left the day before. They went to stay with our neighbors here,” he said.
“If they had stayed, they would have been killed without warning or anything,” he said as he surveyed the damage, glass crunching under his feet.
Many homes in Jenin camp were damaged or destroyed by army bulldozers and pavement was stripped from the roads.
Residents used bulldozers of their own to begin clearing the rubble on Friday after Israeli armored vehicles left, AFP journalists reported.
The early trickle of returning residents turned into a flood, and soon children were playing in the streets.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and its forces regularly make incursions into Palestinian communities, but the latest raids as well as hawkish comments by Israeli officials signaled an escalation, residents said.
Since the Gaza war began on October 7, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 661 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
At least 23 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks in the territory during the same period, according to Israeli officials.
Rift over ultra-Orthodox education funding deepens Israeli coalition woes
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- The ultra-Orthodox parties have been less vocal about the conduct of the war but have fought hard for benefits for their Haredi community
- Tensions have run especially high over the recent abolition of an exemption long enjoyed by Haredi men from conscription into the military
JERUSALEM: Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties, already at odds with coalition partners over demands to draft young religious men into the army, are again testing the unity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with a challenge over education funding.
The latest rift centers on an ultra-Orthodox push for schools in their separate education system to receive the same benefits as state-run schools, especially their “New Horizon” program that adds school hours and sharply hikes teacher pay.
“For a year we have been fighting for the entry of ‘New Horizon’ into ultra-Orthodox institutions. There is no reason for our teachers to be discriminated against,” said ultra-Orthodox Education Minister Haim Biton.
Biton, a member of Shas, one of two Orthodox parties in the right-wing coalition, said they would not quit the government over the issue. But the other ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism (UTJ), notified the coalition whip that until the funding issue was resolved it would boycott votes in parliament.
Coalition whip Ophir Katz said he was working to avert a showdown ahead of a vote on a 3.4 billion shekel ($918.35 million) budget boost to help fund tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from their homes by rocket fire from Lebanon.
The dispute is the latest of many that have highlighted both the tensions within Netanyahu’s unwieldy coalition through almost two years of near-constant crisis punctuated by mass protests against judicial reforms and the Gaza war.
With a grouping of religious and hard-line nationalist-religious parties and his own right-wing Likud party, Netanyahu controls 64 of parliament’s 120 seats but from the start, relations between ministers have been fractious.
Far-right parties led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have repeatedly shaken the coalition over issues including the handling of the Gaza war, threatening to leave over any move, backed by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, toward a deal to end the conflict.
The ultra-Orthodox parties have been less vocal about the conduct of the war but have fought hard for benefits for their Haredi community, who comprise around 13 percent of the population.
Tensions have run especially high over the recent abolition of an exemption long enjoyed by Haredi men from conscription into the military under a ruling by the Supreme Court, but the education budget has also caused problems.
“The Haredi parties feel that the extreme right secured all of its demands from the government and Ben-Gvir gets whatever he wants from the prime minister, while they are failing,” said Gilad Malach, director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s ultra-Orthodox program.
With Netanyahu’s government likely to face a reckoning at the polls over the security failures that allowed the Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas from Gaza to happen, none of the parties have shown any real inclination to walk out.
But even so, such tensions contain the seeds of future problems, Malach said. “It might begin a process that all parties don’t want right now but that might be the result.”
Tunisian presidential candidate Zammel released from detention, state news agency says
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- Ayachi Zammel is one of three candidates approved by Tunisia’s electoral commission to run in a presidential election on Oct. 6
- Zammel campaign member Mahdi Abdel Jawad described his arrest as a kidnapping
TUNIS: Tunisian presidential candidate Ayachi Zammel was released from police custody on Friday shortly after he was set free from a previous detention then re-arrested over alleged election-related irregularities, the state news agency TAP reported.
Zammel is one of three candidates approved by Tunisia’s electoral commission to run in a presidential election on Oct. 6 which opposition critics say is rigged in favor of President Kais Saied.
He was arrested on Monday on suspicion of falsifying voter forms. A judge ordered him set free on Thursday. But two lawyers for Zammel, Abdessatar Massoudi and Dalila Ben Mbarek, said he was arrested again immediately after his release from Borj El Amri prison.
On Friday, he was released again on a judge’s orders, TAP said. His case was postponed until Sept. 19.
Zammel campaign member Mahdi Abdel Jawad described his arrest as a kidnapping.
He is accused of falsifying voter forms for next month’s election. Each candidate must submit forms from 10,000 supporters to qualify to stand. He denies the allegation.
Zammel has said he faces restrictions and intimidation because he is a serious competitor to Saied. He has pledged to rebuild democracy, guarantee freedoms and fix Tunisia’s collapsing economy.
Saied was democratically elected in 2019, but then tightened his grip on power and began ruling by decree in 2021 in a move the opposition has described as a coup.
Major political factions say Saied’s years in power have eroded the democratic gains of Tunisia’s 2011 revolution.
Opposition parties and human rights groups have accused the authorities of using arbitrary restrictions to help ensure Saied’s re-election.
Along with Zammel and Saied, politician Zouhair Maghzaoui is approved to run in the election.
UN mission says both Sudan sides committed abuses, peacekeepers needed
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- Report said that both the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces were responsible for attacks on civilians
GENEVA: Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have committed abuses that may amount to war crimes, and world powers need to send in peacekeepers and widen an arms embargo to protect civilians, a UN-mandated mission said on Friday.
Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have both raped and attacked civilians, used torture and made arbitrary arrests, according to the report that said it was based on 182 interviews with survivors, relatives and witnesses. “The gravity of our findings and failure of the warring parties to protect civilians underscores the need for urgent and immediate intervention,” the UN fact-finding mission’s chair, Mohamed Chande Othman, told reporters.
Both sides have dismissed past accusations from the US and rights groups, and have accused each other of carrying out abuses. Neither immediately responded to requests for comment on Friday, or released a statement in response to the report.
Othman and the two other mission members called for an independent force to be deployed without delay.
“We cannot continue to have people dying before our eyes and do nothing about it,” mission member Mona Rishmawi said. A UN-mandated peacekeeping force was a possibility, she added.
The mission called for the expansion of an existing UN arms embargo which currently just applies to the western region of Darfur where thousands of ethnic killings have been reported. The war that started in Khartoum in April last year has spread to 14 out of 18 of the country’s states.
Hundreds of rapes reported
The mission said it had also found reasonable grounds to believe the RSF and its allied militias had committed additional war crimes including the abduction of women who were forced into sexual slavery and the recruitment of child soldiers.
Mission member Joy Ngozi Ezeilo said unnamed support groups had received reports of more than 400 rapes in the first year of the war, but the real number was probably much higher.
“The rare brutality of this war will have a devastating and long-lasting psychological impact on children,” she said.
The fact-finding team said it had tried to contact Sudanese authorities on multiple occasions but had got no answer. It said the RSF had asked to cooperate with the mission, without elaborating.
The conflict began when competition between the army and the RSF, who had previously shared power after staging a coup, flared into open warfare.
Civilians in Sudan are facing worsening famine, mass displacement and disease after 17 months of war, aid agencies say.
US-led mediators said last month that they had secured guarantees from both parties at talks in Switzerland to improve access for humanitarian aid, but that the Sudanese army’s absence from the discussions had hindered progress.
The report is the three-member mission’s first since its creation in October 2023 by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
A group of Western countries including Britain will call for its renewal at a meeting this month, with diplomats expecting opposition from Sudan which says the war is an internal affair.
Iraqi date farmers fight drought to protect national treasure
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- Dates are Iraq’s second-largest export product after oil, which dominates export revenues and generates more than $120 million
- The date palm and its bounty are national icons, but they are being battered by drought
Janajah: Bare feet pressed against the rough trunk of a palm tree, his back supported by a metal and fabric harness, Ali Abed begins the climb to the dates above.
In Iraq, the date palm and its bounty are national icons, but they are being battered by drought.
Once known as the country of “30 million palm trees,” Iraq’s ancient date-growing culture had already suffered from upheaval, especially during the 1980-88 war with Iran, before climate change became a major threat.
In the still lush countryside of central Iraq, near Janajah village in Babylon province, hundreds of date palms stand tall and majestic, surrounded by vines and fruit trees.
During harvest season, the branches are heavy with clusters of yellow and red dates.
Rising at dawn to avoid the searing heat, harvesters climb the palms using only their upper body strength, aided by a harness and rope wrapped around the trunk.
“Last year, the orchards and the palm groves were thirsty; we almost lost them. This year, thanks to God, we had good water and a good harvest,” said Abed, a 36-year-old farmer from Biramana, a village a few kilometers (miles) from Janajah.
Once at the top, they pick the ripe dates, filling baskets that are lowered to the ground and emptied into basins, which are then loaded onto lorries.
Abed noted, however, that the harvest is much smaller now — about half of what it used to be. He once collected more than 12 tons but now brings in just four or five.
Abed criticized the lack of government support, saying aerial insecticide campaigns are not enough.
Iraq has spent over a decade trying to revive the date palm, a vital economic asset and national symbol.
Authorities and religious institutions have launched programs and mega-projects to encourage tree planting and growth.
An agriculture ministry spokesperson told the official INA news agency last month that, “for the first time since the 1980s,” the number of date palms had risen to “more than 22 million,” up from a low of just eight million.
During the Iran-Iraq War, palm groves were razed in vast areas along the border to prevent enemy infiltration.
Today, dates are Iraq’s second-largest export product after oil, which dominates export revenues and generates more than $120 million, according to the World Bank.
In 2023, Iraq exported around 650,000 tons of dates, official statistics show.
Yet around Janajah, many palm trees lie dead and decapitated.
“All these palm trees are dead due to the drought; the whole region is suffering,” said 56-year-old farmer Maitham Talib.
“Before, we had water. People irrigated abundantly. Now, we need complicated machinery,” he said, observing the harvest.
The United Nations has labelled Iraq one of the five countries in the world most vulnerable to some of the effects of climate change.
The country has endured four consecutive years of drought, though this year saw some relief with winter rainfall.
Alongside rising temperatures that have hit 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in summer and declining rainfall, Iraq also faces falling river levels, blamed on dams built upstream by Iran and Turkiye.
Kifah Talib, 42, lamented the slow devastation wrought by the drought.
“It used to be paradise: apple, pomegranate, citrus trees and vines — everything grew here,” he said.