PORT SUDAN: Amnesty International called on the United Nations Thursday to extend the arms embargo on Darfur to cover all of Sudan, in a report on weapons flooding the war-torn country.
The 15-month war between Sudan’s regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces “is being fueled by an almost unimpeded supply of weapons into Sudan by states and corporate actors around the world,” the rights watchdog said.
The new report, titled “New Weapons Fuelling the Sudan Conflict,” found recently manufactured or transferred weapons from countries including Russia, Turkiye, Serbia, China and others were being imported and used on the battlefield.
Since it erupted in April last year, the war has killed tens of thousands of people, with some estimating the toll to be as high as 150,000, according to US envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello.
It has also uprooted over 10 million people, creating what the UN calls the world’s worst displacement crisis.
“There are hundreds of thousands of weapons, millions of rounds of ammunition going into Sudan,” fueling mass human rights violations, Brian Castner, Amnesty’s head of crisis research, told AFP.
The existing arms embargo, which since 2004 has applied only to Sudan’s western Darfur region, “is both too narrowly focused” and “too poorly implemented to have any meaningful impact on curbing these weapons flows,” the report found.
The UN Security Council must “urgently expand the arms embargo to the rest of Sudan, and also strengthen its monitoring and verification mechanisms,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty’s senior director for Regional Human Rights Impact.
Even if the Security Council — whose response to the Sudan war Amnesty has dubbed “woefully inadequate” — does not extend the embargo, “all states and corporate actors must immediately cease supplies of all arms and ammunition to Sudan,” or risk violating arms treaty obligations and international humanitarian law.
Both sides of the conflict have been repeatedly accused of war crimes including deliberately targeting civilians, indiscriminate shelling of residential areas and blocking humanitarian aid, while millions of Sudanese suffer on the brink of starvation.
According to Castner, the sheer volume of small arms entering Sudan is cause for significant alarm.
“Most people are killed by small arms. Most violations, including sexual violence and displacement, are facilitated by small arms,” the veteran weapons investigator said.
“It’s individual soldiers with rifles that are removing people from their homes and burning them,” he continued.
On Monday, French medical charity Doctors Without Borders said that of thousands of war-wounded treated at one of its main hospitals in the Sudanese capital, 53 percent suffered gunshot wounds.
Amnesty calls for full Sudan arms embargo
https://arab.news/mjnnh
Amnesty calls for full Sudan arms embargo
- “There are hundreds of thousands of weapons, millions of rounds of ammunition going into Sudan,” fueling mass human rights violations, said Brian Castner on Amnesty
- The UN Security Council must “urgently expand the arms embargo to the rest of Sudan, and also strengthen its monitoring and verification mechanisms,” said Deprose Muchena
Three Lebanese civil defense members killed in Israeli attack, Lebanese ministry says
CAIRO: Three members of the Lebanese Civil Defense were killed and two others wounded, one critically, in an Israeli attack while they were extinguishing fires in the southern town of Froon, Lebanon’s health ministry said on Saturday.
Gaza civil defense says 3 killed in Israeli strike on school
- The Israeli military said it conducted a “precise strike” at the school
- A large crowd gathered outside the building in the aftermath of the strike, picking their way over rubble as emergency workers tried to help the wounded
GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Gaza’s civil defense agency said an Israeli air strike targeting a school-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians killed at least three people on Saturday, while the military reported it struck a Hamas command center.
“Three martyrs and more than 20 wounded people were retrieved after an Israeli warplane fired two missiles at a prayer room and a classroom at the Amr Ibn Al-Aas School, where refugees were sheltering in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in northern Gaza City,” Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for the civil defense agency, told AFP.
The Israeli military said it conducted a “precise strike” at the school.
The strike targeted “terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command and control center... embedded inside a compound that previously served as Amr Ibn Al-Aas school,” the military said in a statement.
A large crowd gathered outside the building in the aftermath of the strike, picking their way over rubble as emergency workers tried to help the wounded, AFPTV footage showed.
Displaced Gazan Abd Arooq said the school had served as a shelter for more than 2,000 people.
“We don’t know where to go. We are in the street,” he said.
“There is no sanctity for mosques, schools or even the houses we live in.”
In recent months, Israeli forces have struck several schools that were housing displaced Palestinians, many of them in Gaza City, saying the strikes targeted Hamas militants.
Tens of thousands of displaced people have sought refuge in schools since the war in Gaza, which entered its 12th month on Saturday, broke out following Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7.
That attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians and some hostages killed in captivity, according to official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has so far killed at least 40,939 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.
According to the United Nations human rights office, most of the dead are women and children.
Gaza war in its 12th month with truce hopes slim
- Hamas is demanding a complete Israeli withdrawal, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists troops must remain along the Gaza-Egypt border
- The United States, Qatar and Egypt have all been mediating in an effort to bring about a ceasefire in the war
GAZA: The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza entered its 12 month Saturday with little sign of respite for the Palestinian territory or hope for Israeli hostages still held captive.
The chances of a truce that would also swap Palestinian prisoners jailed by Israel for hostages held by Hamas appear slim, with both sides sticking doggedly to their positions.
Hamas, whose October 7 attack on Israel sparked the war, is demanding a complete Israeli withdrawal, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists troops must remain along the Gaza-Egypt border.
The United States, Qatar and Egypt have all been mediating in an effort to bring about a ceasefire in the war that authorities in the Hamas-run Gaza say has killed at least 40,939 people.
According to the United Nations human rights office, most of the dead are women and children.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians including some hostages killed in captivity, according to official Israeli figures.
Of 251 hostages seized by Palestinian militants during the attack, 97 remain in Gaza including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Scores were released during a one-week truce in November.
Israel’s announcement last Sunday that the bodies of six hostages including a US-Israeli citizen had been recovered shortly after being killed sparked grief and anger in Israel.
Marking the anniversary, UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) chief Philippe Lazzarini posted on X on Saturday: “Eleven months. Enough. No one can take this any longer. Humanity must prevail. Ceasefire now.”
International pressure to end the war was further underlined by Friday’s shooting dead in the West Bank of a Turkish-American activist demonstrating against Israeli settlements in the occupied territory.
The family of 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi has demanded an independent investigation into her death, saying on Saturday her life “was taken needlessly, unlawfully, and violently by the Israeli military.”
The UN rights office said Israeli forces killed Eygi with a “shot in the head.”
Turkiye said she was killed by “Israeli occupation soldiers,” and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the Israeli action as “barbaric.”
The United States called her death “tragic,” and has pressed its close ally Israel to investigate.
Israeli settlements in the West Bank — where about 490,000 people live — are illegal under international law.
Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israeli troops or settlers have killed more than 662 Palestinians in the West Bank which Israel occupied in 1967, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
At least 23 Israelis, including members of the security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, Israeli officials say.
Eygi’s death came on the day Israeli forces withdrew from a deadly 10-day raid in the West Bank city of Jenin, where AFP journalists reported residents returning home to widespread destruction.
The Jenin pullout came with Israel at loggerheads with the United States over talks to forge a truce in the Gaza war.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday “90 percent is agreed” and urged Israel and Hamas to finalize a deal.
But Netanyahu denied this, telling Fox News: “It’s not close.”
Hamas is demanding Israel’s complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, saying it agreed months ago to a proposal outlined by US President Joe Biden.
AFP reporters said several air strikes and shelling rocked the territory overnight and early Saturday.
Gaza’s civil defense agency and the Palestinian Red Crescent said an Israeli air strike killed four people near the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
The civil defense and a witness said an air strike that targeted a flat in Bureij camp killed another four.
And in Jabalia, an Israeli air strike killed four more Palestinians, civil defense officials said.
They added that a woman and a child were also killed in an air strike north of Gaza City.
Medics reported at least 33 Palestinians wounded in an air strike on a residential area in Beit Lahia and said they were being treated at Al-Awda, Kamal Adwan and Indonesian hospitals.
In the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, the civil defense said an Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter for displaced people killed at least three people and wounded more than 20.
Israel has also traded fire with Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement since the October 7 attack.
On Saturday Hezbollah said it targeted two Israeli bases with Katyusha rockets. Lebanon’s National News Agency said Israel carried out air strikes and shelling of several areas of the country’s south.
The Israeli military said it detected missiles crossing from Lebanon, intercepting some of them. It said it later struck a Hezbollah launch site in the Qabrikha area of southern Lebanon, as well as Aita Al-Shaab and Kfarshuba.
Turkiye’s Erdogan calls for Islamic alliance against Israel
- “The only step that will stop Israeli arrogance, Israeli banditry, and Israeli state terrorism is the alliance of Islamic countries,” Erdogan said
- He said recent steps that Turkiye has taken to improve ties with Egypt and Syria are aimed at “forming a line of solidarity against the growing threat of expansionism”
ISTANBUL: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday Islamic countries should form an alliance against what he called “the growing threat of expansionism” from Israel.
He made the comment after describing what Palestinian and Turkish officials said was the killing by Israeli troops of a Turkish-American woman taking part in a protest on Friday against settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“The only step that will stop Israeli arrogance, Israeli banditry, and Israeli state terrorism is the alliance of Islamic countries,” Erdogan said at an Islamic schools’ association event near Istanbul.
He said recent steps that Turkiye has taken to improve ties with Egypt and Syria are aimed at “forming a line of solidarity against the growing threat of expansionism,” which he said also threatened Lebanon and Syria.
Erdogan hosted Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Ankara this week and they discussed the Gaza war and ways to further repair their long-frozen ties during what was the first such presidential visit in 12 years.
Ties between them started thawing in 2020 when Turkiye began diplomatic efforts to ease tensions with estranged regional rivals, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Erdogan said in July that Turkiye would extend an invitation to Syrian President Bashar Assad “any time” for possible talks to restore relations between the two neighbors, who severed ties in 2011 after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.
Israel did not immediately comment on Erdogan’s remarks on Saturday.
Israel’s military said after Friday’s incident that it was looking into reports that a female foreign national “was killed as a result of shots fired in the area. The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review.
There was no immediate comment on Friday’s incident from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.
Morocco stops 45,000 migrants from crossing to Europe in 2024
- It did not give comparative data for the same period in 2023
- Last year, Morocco stopped 75,184 people from illegally crossing to Europe, up 6 percent from a year earlier, government data showed
RABAT: Morocco has stopped 45,015 people from illegally migrating to Europe since January and busted 177 migrant trafficking gangs, Morocco’s state news agency MAP reported on Friday, citing interior ministry data.
It did not give comparative data for the same period in 2023 and the interior ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Last year, Morocco stopped 75,184 people from illegally crossing to Europe, up 6 percent from a year earlier, government data showed.
The Moroccan navy has also rescued 10,859 migrants at sea so far this year, MAP said, citing the interior ministry data.
“In 2024, Morocco continues to face an increasing migratory pressure as a direct outcome of the prevailing instability in the Sahel region and porous borders,” it quoted the ministry as saying.
The North African country has for long been a major launch pad for African migrants aiming to reach Europe through the Mediterranean, the Atlantic or by jumping the fence surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
Morocco and Spain have strengthened their cooperation in addressing illegal migration since they patched up a separate diplomatic feud in 2022.
Last month, however, hundreds of migrants took advantage of a thick mist to swim to Ceuta, according to Spanish police.
Tighter surveillance of Morocco’s northern borders is prompting an increasing number of migrants to try the riskier and longer Atlantic route to the Canary Islands.
