AMMAN: The British Embassy in Amman has notified the Jordanian foreign ministry that it was suspending the visa-exempt status for Jordanian nationals wishing to travel to the UK, state news agency Petra reported.
The Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) facilitates the granting visas to visitors including Jordanians was being suspended due to ‘continued violations’ by Jordanian visitors to the UK, according to a statement.
The ETA was first launched on Nov. 15, 2023, for nationals of Qatar, before being expanded in February 2024 to include nationals of Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Ministry spokesperson Sufian Qudah said there has been “continued misuse” despite efforts by Jordanian Embassy officials in London to explore solutions with British authorities to the violations of Jordanian travelers of British residency and immigration laws.
The British decision is subject to amendment in the future and discussions are ongoing with the British to re-enact the ETA under conditions that would address violations, Qudah added.
The UK Home Office said the change was being made because the number of asylum claims from Jordanians increased from 17 in Oct. 2023 to 261 in June 2024.
UK suspends electronic visas for Jordanians over ‘violations’
https://arab.news/wu6rn
UK suspends electronic visas for Jordanians over ‘violations’
20 killed, 450 injured in second wave of blasts in Lebanon
- Walkie-talkies, solar equipment targeted day after pagers blast, report says
- New blasts hit a country thrown into confusion, anger after Tuesday’s bombings
BEIRUT: Explosions in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon were apparently a second wave of detonations of electronic devices, state media said on Wednesday.
The report said walkie-talkies and even solar equipment were targeted a day after hundreds of pagers blew up.
At least 20 people were killed and 450 were wounded, the Health Ministry said.
A Hezbollah official told the Associated Press that walkie-talkies used by the group exploded.
Lebanon’s official news agency reported that solar energy systems exploded in homes in several areas of Beirut and southern Lebanon, wounding at least one girl.
The new blasts hit a country thrown into confusion and anger after Tuesday’s pager bombings, which appeared to be a complex Israeli attack targeting Hezbollah members that caused civilian casualties, too.
At least 12 people were killed, including two children, and about 2,800 people were wounded as hundreds of pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded wherever they happened to be — in homes, cars, at grocery stores and in cafes.
Wednesday’s blasts caused fires, injuries and a state of hysteria because some of the devices were being carried by security personnel during the funeral ceremonies for the victims of the pager explosions on Tuesday.
Explosions were heard in the southern suburbs of Beirut and several areas in the south and the Bekaa Valley.
Many were injured outside hospitals where the wounded from Tuesday’s bombings were being treated. Several of the wounded were transferred to Baalbek hospitals.
Some devices exploded with their carriers in front of the American University Hospital in Beirut.
Four cars containing devices exploded in the town of Aabbassiyeh in the south, three people were injured when a device exploded in a car in Jdeidet Marjeyoun, and parked cars exploded in Nabatieh because there were wireless devices in them.
Ambulances rushed everywhere, and Hezbollah supporters went out on motorcycles searching for victims after abandoning all their communication devices.
The Lebanese Army Command asked citizens “not to gather in places witnessing security incidents to make way for the arrival of medical teams.”
According to initial information, the devices that exploded on Wednesday are Icom V82 models, bought in the deal for pagers last spring.
Panic increased when information circulated on social media about the explosion of solar panels connected to Internet devices. There were also claims that computers exploded.
A Hezbollah member in a video clip that showed a room with shrapnel damage, said: “This was because of the device’s battery. I removed it from the device and put it aside. Look what happened.”
Footage showed fires in residential apartments in the southern suburbs of Beirut and in the south, and casualties during funeral ceremonies after their devices exploded.
The Axios website reported that “Israel blew up thousands of wireless communication devices used by Hezbollah elements in a second wave.”
In the first wave of bombings, it appeared that small amounts of explosives had been hidden in the thousands of pagers delivered to Hezbollah and then remotely detonated.
The reports of further electronic devices exploding suggested even greater infiltration of boobytraps into Lebanon’s supply chain.
It also deepens concerns over the attacks in which hundreds of devices exploded in public areas, often with many bystanders, with no certainty of who was holding the rigged devices.
Relentless fighting is devastating Sudan and escalating in Darfur’s capital, UN says
- Up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes
- Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders
UNITED NATIONS: Relentless violence has devastated Sudan and large-scale fighting has escalated in and around the only capital in Sudan’s western Darfur region not held by paramilitary forces, the United Nations top humanitarian official said Wednesday.
Acting humanitarian chief Joyce Msuya told the UN Security Council that famine has already struck Zamzam camp, about 15 kilometers from North Darfur’s embattled capital of El Fasher. She said a large-scale humanitarian operation is “a matter of life and death.”
Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital Khartoum and spread to other regions including Darfur. The UN says over 14,000 people have been killed and 33,000 injured.
Msuya urged the council to demand that the warring government and paramilitary Rapid Support Force refrain from targeting civilians, hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure, and allow unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid through all border crossings and across conflict lines.
She also called on the UN’s 193 member nations to pressure the parties “to agree to a humanitarian pause to save lives, give civilians respite and allow us to deliver assistance.”
Two decades ago, Darfur became synonymous with genocide and war crimes, particularly by the notorious Janjaweed Arab militias, against populations that identify as Central or East African. Up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes.
That legacy appears to have returned, with the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, saying in January there are grounds to believe both sides may be committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide in Darfur.
Msuya said “the world should not abide in El Fasher the atrocities we witnessed in West Darfur.”
In June, the Security Council adopted a resolution calling for “an immediate halt to the fighting and for de-escalation in and around El Fasher.”
Regrettably, Msuya said, both sides ignored the call, and fighting escalated in the past week with “constant and heavy” shelling and bombing.
“Civilians, especially women and children, have been hit (and) civilian sites and infrastructure — including hospitals and internally displaced persons’ camps — have been hit,” she said. “Of the three main hospitals in El Fasher, only one is functioning, although only partially following an attack that caused extensive damage in August.”
In August, international experts confirmed there is famine in Zamzam camp, which houses around 500,000 displaced people.
Msuya said close to 1.7 million people in North Darfur face “acute food insecurity,” adding that 13 other localities in Sudan have been identified as at risk of famine.
In February, Doctors Without Borders reported that a child was dying every two hours in Zamzam camp, she said. The latest screening by the medical aid organization and the Ministry of Health between Sept. 1 and 5 indicates the situation is getting worse.
“About 34 percent of the children are malnourished, including 10 percent who are severely malnourished,” Msuya said.
Aid deliveries have been impeded by fighting and flooding, but Msuya said that as floodwaters subside in the coming weeks, the UN will be able to start moving food and other assistance to El Fasher and other areas at risk of famine.
The acting undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs stressed that to address “the atrocious humanitarian situation,” there are two keys: a de-escalation in fighting and a willingness by both sides to facilitate access to those in need.
“Be in no doubt: Without safe and predictable access and a steady supply of food and humanitarian supplies, we will see a dramatic spike in mortality — including children — in Zamzam and in other areas around El Fasher,” she said.
“The same goes for the situation across Sudan,” Msuya said, especially the capital Khartoum and neighboring Sennar and Jazeera states in southeast Sudan, which continue to be devastated “by relentless violence.”
Who still uses pagers anyway?
- Mobile phones have mostly made pagers obsolete
As mobile phones became the world’s main communications tool, pagers, also known as beepers because of the sound they make to notify users about incoming messages, were largely rendered obsolete, with demand plunging from their 1990s heyday.
But the tiny electronic devices remain a vital means of communication in some areas — such as health care and emergency services — thanks to their durability and long battery life.
“It’s the cheapest and most efficient way to communicate to a large number of people about messages that don’t need responses,” said a senior surgeon at a major UK hospital, adding that pagers are commonly used by doctors and nurses across the country’s National Health Service (NHS).
“It’s used to tell people where to go, when, and what for.”
Pagers grabbed headlines on Tuesday when thousands used by members of militant group Hezbollah were detonated simultaneously across Lebanon, killing at least nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others.
According to a senior Lebanese security source and another source, explosives inside the devices were planted by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
The UK’s NHS was using around 130,000 pagers in 2019, more than one in 10 of the world’s pagers, according to the government. More up-to-date figures were not available.
Doctors working in hospital emergency departments carry them when they are on call.
Many pagers can also send out a siren and then broadcast a voice message to groups so that whole medical teams are alerted simultaneously to an emergency, a senior doctor in the NHS said. That is not possible with a mobile phone.
Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) uses pagers to alert its crews, a source familiar with the lifeboat service told Reuters. The RNLI declined to comment.
Pagers hard to track
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.
Pagers can be harder to track than smartphones because they receive messages transmitted via radio signal, while mobile phones send information to the network to find the nearest cellular tower and stay connected, allowing it easier to trace.
Pagers also lack more modern navigation technologies like the Global Positioning System, or GPS.
These have made them a popular choice among criminals, especially drug dealers in the United States, in the past.
But gangs are using mobile phones more these days, former FBI agent Ken Gray told Reuters.
“I don’t know if anyone uses them (pagers),” he said.
“They all went to cell phones, burner phones” which can be easily disposed of and replaced with another phone with a different number, making them difficult to trace.
Gray, who served 24 years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and now teaches criminal justice and homeland security at the University of New Haven, said that criminals changed with the times and newer technology.
The global pagers market, once a major source of revenue for companies like Motorola, amounted to $1.6 billion in 2023, according to an April report by Cognitive Market Research.
That amounts to a tiny fraction of the global smartphone market, which was estimated at around half a trillion US dollars as of end-2023.
But demand for pagers is rising as a larger patient population creates more need for efficient communication in the health care sector, the report said, forecasting compound annual growth of 5.9 percent from 2023 to 2030.
It said North America and Europe are the two biggest pager markets, generating $528 million and $496 million in revenue respectively.
Japan firm says no longer makes radio reportedly used in Lebanon blasts
- The IC-V82 is a handheld radio produced and exported in Japan from 2004 to October 2014
Tokyo: Japanese firm Icom said Thursday that it had stopped producing the model of radios reportedly used in recent blasts in Lebanon around 10 years ago.
“The IC-V82 is a handheld radio that was produced and exported, including to the Middle East, from 2004 to October 2014. It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company,” Icom said in a statement.
“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company,” it said.
It added that products for overseas markets are sold exclusively through its authorized distributors, and that its export program is based on Japanese security trade control regulations.
“All of our radios are manufactured at our production subsidiary, Wakayama Icom Inc., in Wakayama Prefecture, under a strict management system... so no parts other than those specified by our company are used in a product. In addition, all of our radios are manufactured at the same factory, and we do not manufacture them overseas,” the statement said.
In the second wave of device explosions in as many days, 20 people died and more than 450 were wounded on Wednesday in Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, officials said.
A source close to Hezbollah said walkie-talkies used by its members blew up in its Beirut stronghold, with state media reporting similar blasts in south and east Lebanon.
They came a day after the simultaneous explosion of hundreds of paging devices used by Hezbollah killed 12 people, including two children, and wounded up to 2,800 others across Lebanon, in an unprecedented attack blamed on Israel.
There was no comment from Israel. The White House warned all sides against “an escalation of any kind.”
Pager and walkie-talkie blasts targeting Hezbollah across Lebanon raise questions, stoke Middle East tensions
- Communication devices exploded simultaneously across Lebanon, killing at least 15 people and injuring thousands
- Suspected Israeli attack represents an embarrassing security breach on such a scale that Hezbollah has almost no choice but to respond
LONDON: At precisely 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, an estimated 3,000 pagers carried by Hezbollah members beeped several times before exploding simultaneously, killing at least 12 people and injuring thousands more across Lebanon and parts of Syria.
At least eight of the dead were reportedly members of Iran-backed Hezbollah, and the many wounded included Mojtaba Amini, Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, who may have lost at least one eye.
But clips from security cameras in shops in Beirut and other locations, circulated on social media, illustrated the dangerously indiscriminate nature of the attack.
Many civilians going about their day also fell victim to the blasts as pagers exploded in supermarkets, on the streets, and in cars and homes. Among the dead were two children who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Fleets of ambulances ferried a reported 2,700 wounded to hospitals across Lebanon, where overwhelmed medics struggled to cope with multiple victims suffering serious wounds, mainly to their hips, where pagers are generally worn on belts, and to hands and eyes.
On Wednesday afternoon, further blasts were reported across Lebanon, this time reportedly involving hand-held radios, causing at least three further fatalities and a hundred more wounded, according to Lebanese state media.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the attack. But on Wednesday a US official told AP that Israel had briefed Washington on the attack after it had been carried out and, with no other feasible suspect in the frame, there is little doubt that it was the handiwork of Mossad, Israel’s lethally inventive foreign intelligence agency.
It is also clear that, figuratively and literally, the pager attack was both designed and timed to send a message.
The opportunity to use pagers as an offensive weapon arose in February when Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah publicly warned members to stop using cell phones, which are easily bugged and traced and have been linked with many assassinations executed by missile attacks.
According to a senior Lebanese security source quoted by The Times of Israel, Hezbollah then ordered 5,000 pagers, which were imported into Lebanon earlier this year.
Initial speculation was that Israel had somehow infected the pagers with code designed to cause lithium batteries inside them to overheat and explode. However, it has since emerged that the pagers used only ordinary AAA batteries.
Besides, the near-instantaneous and synchronized detonations, apparently triggered by incoming messages, suggest the pagers had all been fitted with a small amount of explosive and a miniature electronic detonator.
On Tuesday, a senior Lebanese security source told Reuters: “The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means, even with any device or scanner.”
On Wednesday, Gold Apollo, the Taiwanese firm whose brand name was found on the pagers used in the attack, denied involvement, saying the AR-924 models widely identified after the blasts had been made under license by a Budapest-based company, BAC Consulting KFT.
In a statement issued at 1:40 p.m. Taiwan time on Wednesday, Gold Apollo said: “This model is produced and sold by BAC. Our company only provides the brand trademark authorization and is not involved in the design or manufacturing of this product.”
Images of BAC’s headquarters — a modest, semi-detached building on Szonyi Street in the north of Budapest — have spread on social media, but BAC has yet to comment. Its website went offline on Wednesday and the profile of its owner and managing director was deleted from LinkedIn.
It is, however, extremely unlikely that any genuine company would knowingly take part in such an operation, risking Hezbollah’s wrath, knowing full well that the devices would be easily traced back to it. This has provoked some speculation that BAC, established only in 2022, might have been a front company operated by Israeli intelligence.
A more likely scenario is that the batch of pagers ordered by Hezbollah were intercepted en route to Lebanon by Israeli agents — most probably at a port or airport, where typical customs and shipping delays may have given agents, working with local collaborators, enough time to meddle with the devices.
Budapest, the capital of Hungary, is a major transport hub on the River Danube and is home to Csepel Freeport, the country’s principal port.
Wherever the devices were tampered with, “the use of pagers bears the hallmark of Israel weaponizing digital technology to achieve political ends,” Ibrahim Al-Marashi, associate professor in the Department of History at California State University San Marcos, told Arab News.
Israel has “form” in such warfare. In 2010, “a code known as Stuxnet, snuck into a USB drive, caused Iranian centrifuges to accelerate to the point that they destroyed themselves.”
In 1996, Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash was killed when explosives hidden inside his cell phone were triggered remotely by Israeli agents.
“The advantage of the most recent attack in Lebanon is that it allows Israel to strike from a distance while claiming plausible deniability, avoiding a US rebuke at a time when Washington has pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Hezbollah,” said Al-Marashi.
But the pager attack, he warned, could lead to a dangerous escalation.
“Hezbollah does have the ability to weaponize the digital in retaliation, raising the possibility that violent non-state actors might even pursue artificial intelligence to retaliate against their adversaries.”
Given the complexities of the operation, and the sheer workload involved in sabotaging thousands of devices, there is little doubt that the attack would have been weeks, if not months, in the planning.
But it is the timing of the attack that sends the most worrying signal.
The day after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, its ally Hezbollah began firing missiles into northern Israel — a near-daily bombardment that has increased steadily in intensity, forcing the evacuation of thousands of Israelis from the border region.
After a meeting of its Security Cabinet on Monday night, barely 12 hours before the pagers were detonated, Netanyahu’s office announced that “the Security Cabinet has updated the objectives of the war to include the following: Returning the residents of the north securely to their homes. Israel will continue to act to implement this objective.”
At the same time, reports suggested Netanyahu was on the brink of buckling to the extremist elements in his cabinet by sacking his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who has criticized him for having no postwar plan for Gaza, and replacing him with Gideon Saar, leader of the New Hope — The United Right party.
On Wednesday, the day after the pager attack, reports in Israeli and other media, citing anonymous US and Israeli officials, suggested it had been planned originally as “an opening blow in an all-out war against Hezbollah.”
Relatives mourn Fatima Abdallah — a 10-year-old girl killed in Israel's pager device attack — during her funeral in the village of Saraain in the Bekaa valley on September 18, 2024. (AFP)
According to The Times of Israel, a Hezbollah operative “had come to suspect the devices had been tampered with.” He was killed before he could alert his superiors, but the decision was taken to detonate the pagers before the plot was uncovered.
The question now is whether Israel is poised to follow up the pager attack, perhaps as was planned, with an all-out assault against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“We have been teetering on the brink of a wider war for many months now,” Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, told Arab News.
“Hezbollah and Iran have made it clear they don’t want this broader conflict to erupt, but Israel cannot end the war in Gaza without addressing the security crisis on its northern borders with Iran, Lebanon and Syria.
“In order to address this security imbalance, which puts at risk the safety of the broader population but also that of those displaced since the war began, Israel is trying to target and degrade the ‘Axis of Resistance’ to stave off further threats,” she said, referring to the loose network of Iranian proxies throughout the region.
“But this strategy could certainly push the groups and Iran to respond and eventually draw in regional states and above all the US.”
Most Israelis, said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and founder of the nongovernmental organization Terrestrial Jerusalem, “will tell you that war with Hezbollah is inevitable, but a large percentage say: ‘Not now.’
“The priorities for many are a ceasefire in Gaza, release of the hostages and dialing down the tension in Lebanon. Hezbollah can wait,” he told Arab News.
“Hezbollah, actively backed by Iran, is a much greater threat to Israel than Hamas and the general perception is that there will eventually be a war with Hezbollah, but Israelis know this will be much different than what we have witnessed in the past. It would mean years of war and vast devastation.
“But Netanyahu has a vested interest in the perpetuation of the war, which would be good for Netanyahu but intolerable for Israel.”
What happens next, added Seidemann, “is not only an Israeli decision. Will the US provide the munitions and the rest of the world the legitimization to pursue a protracted war in Lebanon?
“The bottom line is that right now, anything can happen.”
For Al-Marashi, “there are a lot of variables in regard to further escalation that make predictions difficult, more difficult than at any time in analyzing systemic conflicts in the Middle East.
“Despite US sanctions on Iran, news emerged over the weekend that Iran has launched a satellite into space and allegedly has provided ballistic missiles to Russia.
“Second, the Houthis in Yemen have overcome a technical hurdle, launching a ballistic missile against Israel and having it hit Israeli soil, meaning Israel’s system that intercepts such missiles failed.
“From that perspective, both Israeli adversaries have demonstrated they can overcome technical hurdles, signaling to Israel that it is not invulnerable.”
Were a regional war to escalate, he added, “it would put US positions in Bahrain and Iraq in the crosshairs of the Axis of Resistance. Biden, seeking to ensure a Kamala Harris victory in the US election, is most likely going to pressure Israel not to escalate matters prior to the election.
“At the same time, if war in the Middle East helped Donald Trump, that would work to the advantage of Netanyahu, who would prefer a Trump presidency.”
The Middle East, said Brian Katulis, senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, “has been teetering on the edge of a wider escalation for much of this past year, with the risk of nation-states going directly to war with one another growing.”
It was, he told Arab News, important to keep in mind the two core drivers of events — “a regime in Iran that operates with a revolutionary ideology that seeks to upend the state order of the Middle East, and an increasingly right-wing Israeli government that rejects a two-state solution and is unable to see the historic opportunity it has in opening relations with key Arab states if it took steps to define a clear end to this war that leads to a State of Palestine.”
In this context, “the US and outside actors such as Europe, China, and Russia can play important roles in trying to shape the trajectory of events in the region, but the main drivers are the regional actors themselves.
“One interesting pivotal grouping is the Arab Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, who do not want to see a wider regional escalation with Iran but do want to advance a two-state solution.”
Right now, however, even as uncertainty remains about Israel’s next move, much depends on how Hezbollah will respond to the extraordinary blow it suffered on Tuesday.
The attack, described by a Hezbollah official as “the targeting of an entire nation,” has been condemned as “an extremely concerning escalation” by Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the UN special coordinator for Lebanon.
In the past year, Hezbollah has suffered the loss of more than 400 fighters, including senior commander Fuad Shukr, to Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon.
But the pager attack represents an embarrassing security breach on such a scale that if it is to save face, Hezbollah’s leadership has almost no choice but to respond with more than the usual daily delivery of a handful of rockets.
After Israel’s multiple airstrikes in southern Lebanon last week and now the pager attack, “we are more on the precipice of a regional war than ever,” Kelly Petillo, program manager for Middle East and North Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Arab News.
“We will have to see how Hezbollah will retaliate now, and the level of that response will determine where this goes. But these episodes are an indication that things are heating up and we are close to the precipice.”
As for Netanyahu, after almost a year of fighting in Gaza, the fear now is that his answer to growing domestic criticism over the apparent absence of a postwar plan may be an even more nightmarish scenario — more war, only this time in Lebanon.
