TUNIS: The official start of the presidential campaign season in Tunisia began on Saturday, a day after Tunisians took their anger to the streets of the capital to decry what protesters say is the deteriorating state of the country.
In what appeared to be the largest protest since authorities began a monthslong wave of arrests earlier this year, hundreds of Tunisians marched peacefully on Friday and called for an end to what they called a police state.
“We’re here to say no and show that we don’t all agree with what’s really happening in the country,” Khaled Ben Abdeslam, a father and urban development consultant, told The Associated Press.
In 2011, longtime Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled by nationwide protests that unleashed revolt across the Arab world.
More than a decade later, Ben Abdelslam said he was worried about the growing number of political figures who’ve been thrown in jail under President Kais Saied and said he wants to ensure Tunisia “turns the page” for the good of his kids.
“Nobody dares to say or do anything anymore today,” he said as protesters neared Tunisia’s powerful Interior Ministry.
He and other demonstrators slammed both Tunisia’s economic and political woes, carrying signs that grouped together the growing costs of staple items and growing concerns about civil liberties.
“Where is sugar? Where is oil? Where is freedom? Where is democracy?” signs read.
Some carried posters telling the government that “human rights are not optional” while others revived the popular slogans that mobilized Tunisia’s masses against Ben Ali.
This time though, they directed scorn toward Saied.
The protests capped off a week in which the North African country’s largest opposition party, Ennahda, said its senior members had been arrested en masse, at a scale not previously seen.
They come as Saied prepares to campaign for reelection on Oct. 6, when he will ask voters to grant him a second term.
When first elected in 2019, Saied used anti-corruption promises to win over people disillusioned with the political controversies that plagued Tunisia’s young democracy in the years that followed the Arab Spring.
Since taking office, the 66-year-old former law professor has gone to lengths to consolidate his own power, freezing the country’s parliament and rewriting the constitution. Throughout his tenure, authorities have arrested journalists, activists, civil society figures and political opponents across the ideological spectrum.
And though he promised to chart a new course for the country, its unemployment rate has steadily increased to one of the region’s highest at 16 percent, with young Tunisians hit particularly hard.
The economy continues to face significant challenges, yet Saied has managed to energize supporters with populist rhetoric, often accusing migrants from sub-Saharan Africa of violence and crime and aiming at changing the country’s demography.
In the months leading up to his reelection bid, the political crackdown has expanded.
His opponents have been arrested, placed under gag order or faced criminal investigations that observers have called politically motivated. Figures who said they planned to challenge him have been sentenced for breaking campaign finance laws. Others have been ruled ineligible to challenge him by Tunisia’s election authority.
Even those the authority approved have later faced arrest.
Ayachi Zammel, a businessman planning to challenge Saied, was promptly arrested after being announced as one of the two candidates approved to appear on the ballot alongside Saied. His attorney, Abdessattar Messaoudi, told The Associated Press that she feared a court may bar him from politics for life as it had done to other Saied challengers.
The Tunisian Network for the Defense of Rights and Freedoms — a newly formed coalition of civil society groups and political parties — organized Friday’s protest to draw attention to what it called a surge of authoritarianism.
Outrage swelled among many members of the network after the country’s election authority — made up of Saied appointees — dismissed a court ruling ordering it to reinstate three challengers to Saied.
The authority has defied judges who have ruled in favor of candidates who have appealed its decisions and pledged not to allow Mondher Zenaidi, Abdellatif El Mekki and Imed Daimi to appear on the ballot alongside Saied next month.
In less than a month, Tunisian voters are expected to cast their choice in the Oct. 6 poll, amid spreading worrying and doubts about the country’s political future.
Hajjer Mohamed, a 33-year-old law firm assistant said that she and her friends were terrified about the direction Tunisia was heading in ways they couldn’t have imagined when people rejoiced the freedoms won 13 years ago.
“We never thought that after the 2011 revolution we’d live to see the country’s suffocating situation,” she said. “even under former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the situation wasn’t as scandalous as it is today.”
The presidential campaign season in Tunisia is officially underway a day after protests
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The presidential campaign season in Tunisia is officially underway a day after protests
- Ben Abdelslam said he was worried about the growing number of political figures who’ve been thrown in jail under President Kais Saied
Egypt won’t accept security changes on Gaza border, foreign minister says
Security on the border, and whether Israel will maintain a troop presence along a 14-km (9-mile) buffer zone known as the Philadelphi Corridor, have become a focal point of months-long talks aimed at securing a ceasefire and the release of hostages in Gaza.
Israeli troops entered the buffer zone in May as they pursued an offensive around Rafah.
Egypt, which is a mediator in ceasefire talks, says Israel must withdraw and that a Palestinian presence needs to be restored at the Rafah crossing between Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Gaza.
“Egypt reiterates its position, it rejects any military presence along the opposite side of the border crossing and the aforementioned (Philadelphi) corridor,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told reporters during a press conference in Cairo with US counterpart Antony Blinken.
Abdelatty also said that any escalation, including blasts that wounded Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon on Tuesday, would create hurdles for the completion of a Gaza ceasefire deal.
Exploding pagers in attack on Hezbollah were made by a Hungarian company, another firm says
- “According to the cooperation agreement, we authorize BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in designated regions,” Gold Apollo said
- BAC Consulting Kft., a limited liability company, was registered in May 2022, according to company records
TAIPEI: A company based in Hungary was responsible for manufacturing the pagers that exploded in an apparent Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah, another firm said Wednesday.
The attack marked a new escalation in the conflict between the two foes that has often threatened to escalate into all-out war.
Pagers used by the militant group Hezbollah exploded nearly simultaneously a day earlier in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least 12 people, including two children, and wounding around 2,800. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel.
An American official said Israel briefed the United States on Tuesday after the attack, in which small amounts of explosive hidden in the pagers were detonated. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly.
The sophisticated apparently remote attack renewed fears that the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza could spill into a wider regional conflict.
Hamas’ ally Hezbollah and Israeli forces have exchanged fire nearly daily since Oct. 8, the day after a deadly Hamas-led assault in southern Israel triggered the war. Since then, hundreds have been killed in the strikes in Lebanon and dozens in Israel, while tens of thousands on each side of the border have been displaced.
Despite periodic cycles of escalation, Hezbollah and Israel have carefully avoided an all-out war, but Israeli leaders have issued a series of warnings in recent weeks that they might increase operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel began moving more troops to its border with Lebanon on Wednesday as a precautionary measure, according to an official with knowledge of the movements who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The AR-924 pagers used Tuesday’s attack were manufactured by BAC Consulting KFT, based in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, according to a statement released by Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese firm that authorized the use of its brand on the pagers.
BAC appeared to be a shell company.
“According to the cooperation agreement, we authorize BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in designated regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products are solely the responsibility of BAC,” Gold Apollo said in a statement.
The company’s chair, Hsu Ching-kuang, told journalists Wednesday that the firm has had a licensing agreement with BAC for the past three years.
BAC Consulting Kft., a limited liability company, was registered in May 2022, according to company records. It has 7,840 euros in standing capital, the records showed, and had revenue of $725,768 in 2022 and $593,972 in 2023.
At the headquarters in a building in a residential neighborhood of Budapest, Associated Press journalists saw the names of multiple companies, including BAC Consulting, posted on pieces of paper on a window.
A woman who emerged from the building and declined to give her name said the site provides headquarter addresses to various companies.
BAC is registered to Cristiana Rosaria Bársony-Arcidiacono, whose describes herself on her LinkedIn page as a strategic adviser and business developer. Among other positions, Bársony-Arcidiacono says on the page that she has served on the board of directors of the Earth Child Institute, a sustainability group. The group does not list Bársony-Arcidiacono as among its board members on its website.
The AP has attempted to reach Bársony-Arcidiacono via the LinkedIn page and has been unable to establish a connection between her or BAC and the exploding pagers.
The attack in Lebanon started Tuesday afternoon, when pagers in their owners’ hands or pockets started heating up and then exploding — leaving blood-splattered scenes and panicking bystanders.
It appeared that most of those hit were members or linked to members of Hezbollah — whether fighters or civilians — but it was not immediately clear if people with no ties to Hezbollah were also hit.
The Health Ministry said health care workers and two children were among those killed. In the village of Nadi Sheet in the Bekaa Valley, dozens gathered to mourn the death of one of the children, 9-year-old Fatima Abdullah. The Health Ministry had previously given her age as 8.
Her mother, wearing black and donning a yellow Hezbollah scarf, wept alongside other women and children as they gathered around the little girl’s coffin before her burial.
Hezbollah said in a statement Wednesday morning that it would continue its normal strikes against Israel as part of what it describes as a support front for its ally, Hamas, and Palestinians in Gaza.
“This path is continuous and separate from the difficult reckoning that the criminal enemy must await for its massacre on Tuesday,” it said. “This is another reckoning that will come, God willing.”
At hospitals in Beirut on Wednesday, the chaos of the night before had largely subsided, but relatives of the wounded continued to wait.
Lebanon Health Minister Firas Abiad told journalists during a tour on hospitals Wednesday morning that many of the wounded had severe injuries to the eyes, and others had limbs amputated. Journalists were not allowed to enter hospital rooms or film patients.
Abiad said that the wounded had been sent to various area hospitals to avoid any single facility being overloaded and added that Turkiye, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt offered to help treat the patients.
Earlier Wednesday, an Iraqi military plane landed in Beirut carrying 15 tons of medicine and medical equipment, he said.
Experts believe explosive material was put into the pagers prior to their delivery.
The AR-924 pager, advertised as being “rugged,” contains a rechargeable lithium battery, according to specifications advertised on Gold Apollo’s website before they were removed after the attack.
It claimed to have up to 85 days of battery life. That would be crucial in Lebanon, where electricity outages have been common after years of economic collapse. Pagers also run on a different wireless network than mobile phones, making them more resilient in emergencies — one of the reasons why many hospitals worldwide still rely on them.
For Hezbollah, the pagers also provided a means to sidestep what’s believed to be intensive Israeli electronic surveillance on mobile phone networks in Lebanon.
“The phone that we have in our hands — I do not have a phone in my hand — is a listening device,” warned Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in a February speech.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said from the beginning of 2022 until August 2024, Gold Apollo has exported 260,000 sets of pagers, including more than 40,000 sets between January and August of this year. The ministry said that it had no records of direct exports of Gold Apollo pagers to Lebanon.
Iran’s president names first Sunni governor in 45 years
- Arash Zerehtan was appointed head of the western state
- He is the first Sunni to be made a regional governor in the predominantly Shiite country
TEHRAN: Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, on Wednesday nominated a member of the Sunni Muslim minority to be governor of Kurdistan province, official media reported.
Arash Zerehtan was appointed head of the western state, IRNA news agency said, citing government spokesman Fatemeh MoHajjerani.
He is the first Sunni to be made a regional governor in the predominantly Shiite country since the earliest days of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Zerehtan, 48, served as a member of parliament for the city of Paveh between 2020 and this year.
Sunnis account for about 10 percent of Iran’s population, where the vast majority are Shiites and Shiite Islam is the official state religion.
They have very rarely held key positions of power since the revolution.
Pezeshkian, 69, took office in July after an early election following the death of ultraconservative president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash.
During his election campaign, Pezeshkian criticized the lack of representation for ethnic and religious minorities, in particular Sunni Kurds, in important positions.
In August, he made another member of the Sunni minority, Abdolkarim Hosseinzadeh, one of his vice presidents.
Two children among 12 dead in Lebanon pager blasts: minister
- Israel has yet to comment on the unprecedented attacks
- The dead included a girl and a boy as well as four health workers from private hospitals in Beirut’s southern suburbs
BEIRUT: Exploding pagers claimed the lives of 12 people in Lebanon, including two children, the country’s health minister said Wednesday, updating the toll a day after the blasts blamed on Israel.
Hundreds of the wireless devices exploded simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday, hours after Israel said it was broadening the aims of the Gaza war to include its fight against Hamas ally Hezbollah.
Israel has yet to comment on the unprecedented attacks.
On Wednesday, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said 12 people were killed and between 2,750 and 2,800 others were wounded, revising the tolls up from nine dead.
“After checking with all the hospitals,” the toll was revised to “12 dead including two children,” Abiad told a news conference.
The dead included a girl and a boy as well as four health workers from private hospitals in Beirut’s southern suburbs, he said.
The pagers went off in the Iran-backed Hezbollah group’s main strongholds of southern Beirut and Lebanon’s east and south.
Some cases in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley were transferred to Syria, while other cases would be evacuated to Iran, he added.
About 750 wounded people were in the south, about 150 were in the Bekaa Valley and some 1,850 were in the Beirut and its southern suburbs, he said.
Iran accuses Israel of ‘mass murder’ after pager explosions
- Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani was among the wounded
- Iranian Red Crescent dispatches “rescue teams and eye surgeons” to Lebanon to treat the wounded
TEHRAN: Iran accused Israel on Wednesday of “mass murder” after paging devices belonging to the Tehran-aligned Hezbollah group in Lebanon exploded, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others.
Foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said in a statement he “condemned the terrorist act of the Zionist regime... as an example of mass murder.”
Among those wounded in the pager blasts on Tuesday was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani, with Iranian media reporting he suffered injuries “to the hand and the face.”
State television said that Amani was only lightly injured.
The Iranian Red Crescent said on Wednesday it had dispatched “rescue teams and eye surgeons” to Lebanon to treat the wounded.
There was no immediate comment from Israel on the wave of explosions that killed nine people, including the 10-year-old daughter of a Hezbollah member, and wounded around 2,800 others.
The blasts came just hours after Israel announced it was broadening the aims of the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attacks to include its fight against the group’s ally Hezbollah along the country’s border with Lebanon.
In his statement, Kanani expressed solidarity with the families of those killed and wounded in the explosions including the Iranian ambassador.
“Combating the terrorist acts of the (Israeli) regime and the threats arising from them is an obvious necessity,” said Kanani.
“It is necessary for the international community to act quickly in order to counter the impunity of the Zionist criminal authorities.”
