WASHINGTON: US-arranged flights have brought about 350 Americans and their immediate relatives out of Lebanon this week during escalated fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, while thousands of others still there face airstrikes and diminishing commercial flights.
In Washington, senior State Department and White House officials met Thursday with two top Arab American officials to discuss US efforts to help American citizens leave Lebanon. The two leaders also separately met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security.
Michigan state Rep. Alabas Farhat and Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, used the White House meeting to “really drive home a lot of important points about the issues our community members are facing on the ground and a lot of the logistical problems that they’re encountering with it when it comes to this evacuation,” Ayoub said.
Some officials and community leaders in Michigan, home to the nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans, are calling on the US to start an evacuation. Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said that was not being considered right now.
“The US military is, of course, on the ready and has a whole wide range of plans. Should we need to evacuate American citizens out of Lebanon, we absolutely can,” Singh told reporters.
Israel has opened a pounding air campaign deep into Lebanon and a ground incursion in the country’s south targeting the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group. Iran on Tuesday fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles toward Israel, leaving the region bracing for any Israeli retaliation and fearing an all-out regional war.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since the day after Hamas, another Iranian-backed militant group, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, triggering the war in Gaza.
Other countries, from Greece to the United Kingdom, Japan and Colombia, have arranged flights or sent military planes to ferry out their citizens.
As Israeli bombardments targeting senior Hezbollah leaders shook southern neighborhoods in Lebanon’s capital last week, “We could still see, hear and feel everything” despite fleeing to the mountains outside Beirut, said Nicolette Hutcherson, a longtime humanitarian volunteer living in Lebanon with her husband and three children.
The only seats Hutcherson’s family could find on commercial carriers were for flights weeks away and for thousands of dollars, she said. Ultimately, Hutcherson and her young children joined crowds heading to Lebanon’s Mediterranean marinas, finding spots on pleasure boats turned evacuation ships for the nine-hour ride to Cyprus.
Her husband was able to find a single seat out on a plane days later to join them.
Another American family was mourning Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a resident of metro Detroit’s Dearborn area, who was killed in southern Lebanon on Tuesday. Family members said he stayed to help civilians too old, infirm or poor to flee.
He had been on the phone with his daughter Tuesday when the impact of a strike knocked him off his feet, his daughter, Nadine Kamel Jawad, said in a statement.
“He simply got up, found his phone, and told me he needed to finish praying in case another strike hit him,” she said.
The State Department has been telling Americans for almost a year not to travel to Lebanon and advising them to leave the country on commercial flights for months. It also has made clear that government-run evacuations are rare, while offering emergency loans to aid travel out of Lebanon.
Some Americans said relatives who are US citizens or green-card holders have been struggling for days or weeks to get seats on flights out of Lebanon. Limits on withdrawing money from banks due to Lebanon’s longstanding economic collapse and intermittent electricity and Internet have made it difficult, they said.
Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a lawyer based in Washington, paid $5,000 to get a female relative on the last seat of a flight out of Beirut on Saturday.
“She was on her way to the airport” when Israeli began one of its first days of intensified bombing, Abou-Chedid said.
By Thursday, some Americans said their loved ones had been able to secure tickets for upcoming flights and were hopeful.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the US would continue to organize flights as long the security situation in Lebanon is dire and there is demand.
Miller said Lebanon’s flag carrier, Middle East Airlines, also had set aside about 1,400 seats on flights for Americans over the past week. Several hundred had taken them, he said.
Miller could not speak to the cost of the airline’s flights, over which the US government has no regulatory oversight, but said the maximum fare that would be charged for a US-organized contract flight would be $283 per person.
More than 6,000 American citizens have contacted the US Embassy in Beirut seeking information about departing the country over the past week.
Not all of those have actually sought assistance in leaving, and Miller said the department understood that some Americans, many of them dual US-Lebanese nationals and longtime residents of the country, may choose to stay.
Miller said the embassy is prepared to offer temporary loans to Americans who choose to remain in Lebanon but want to relocate to a potentially safer area of the country. The embassy also would provide emergency loans to Americans who wish to leave on the US-contracted flights.
US arranges flights to bring Americans out of Lebanon as others seek escape
https://arab.news/ngb8k
US arranges flights to bring Americans out of Lebanon as others seek escape
- Some officials and community leaders in Michigan, home to the nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans, are calling on the US to start an evacuation
- Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said: “The US military is, of course, on the ready and has a whole wide range of plans”
Erdogan ally wants pro-Kurdish party, jailed militant to talk
- The pro-Kurdish DEM Party, parliament’s third largest, responded by applying for its co-chairs to meet with Ocalan, founder of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
ANKARA: A key ally of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan expanded on his proposal to end 40 years of conflict with Kurdish militants by proposing on Tuesday that parliament’s pro-Kurdish party holds direct talks with the militants’ jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party, made the call a month after suggesting that Ocalan announce an end to the insurgency in exchange for the possibility of his release.
The pro-Kurdish DEM Party, parliament’s third largest, responded by applying for its co-chairs to meet with Ocalan, founder of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
Erdogan described Bahceli’s initial proposal as a “historic window of opportunity” but has not spoken of any peace process.
Ocalan has been held in a prison on the island of Imrali, south of Istanbul, since his capture 25 years ago.
“We expect face-to-face contact between Imrali and the DEM group to be made without delay, and we resolutely reiterate our call,” Bahceli told his party’s lawmakers in a parliamentary meeting, using the name of the island to refer to Ocalan.
Bahceli regularly condemns pro-Kurdish politicians as tools of the PKK.
DEM’s predecessor party was involved in peace talks between Ankara and Ocalan a decade ago. Gulistan Kilic Kocyigit, DEM’s parliamentary group chairperson, said it applied to the Justice Ministry on Tuesday for its leaders to meet Ocalan.
“We are ready to make every contribution for a democratic solution to the Kurdish issue and the democratization of Turkiye,” she said.
Turkiye and its Western allies call the PKK a terrorist group. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the fighting, which in the past was focused in the mainly Kurdish southeast but is now centered on northern Iraq, where the PKK is based.
Growing regional instability and changing political dynamics are seen as factors behind the bid to end the conflict with the PKK. The chances of success are unclear as Ankara has given no clues on what it may entail.
The only concrete move so far has been Ankara’s permission for Ocalan’s nephew to visit him, the first family visit in 4-1/2 years.
Authorities are continuing to crack down on alleged PKK activities. Early on Tuesday, police detained 231 people of suspected PKK ties, the interior ministry said. DEM Party said those detained included its local officials and activists.
Earlier this month, the government replaced five pro-Kurdish mayors in southeastern cities for similar reasons, in a move that drew criticism from DEM and others.
Algeria holds writer Boualem Sansal on national security charges: lawyer
Sansal had been interrogated by “anti-terrorist” prosecutors and said he was being “deprived of his freedom on the grounds of his writing“
PARIS: Algerian authorities have remanded in custody on national security charges prominent French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal following his arrest earlier this month that sparked alarm throughout the literary world, his French lawyer said on Tuesday.
“Boualem Sansal... was today placed in detention” on the basis of an article of the Algerian penal code “which punishes all attacks on state security,” lawyer Francois Zimeray said in a statement to AFP.
He added that Sansal had been interrogated by “anti-terrorist” prosecutors and said he was being “deprived of his freedom on the grounds of his writing.”
Sansal, a major figure in francophone modern literature, is known for his strong stances against both authoritarianism and Islamism, as well as being a forthright campaigner on freedom of expression issues.
His detention by Algeria comes against a background of tensions between France and its former colony, which also appear to have spread to the literary world.
The 75-year-old writer, granted French nationality this year, was on November 16 arrested at Algiers airport after returning from France, according to several media reports.
The Gallimard publishing house, which has published his work for a quarter of a century, in a statement expressed “its very deep concern following the arrest of the writer by the Algerian security services,” calling for his “immediate release.”
A relative latecomer to writing, Sansal turned to novels in 1999 and has tackled subjects including the horrific 1990s civil war between authorities and Islamists.
His books are not banned in Algeria but he is a controversial figure, particularly since making a visit to Israel in 2014.
Sansal’s hatred of Islamism has not been confined to Algeria and he has also warned of a creeping Islamization in France, a stance that has made him a favored author of prominent figures on the right and far-right.
In 2015, Sansal won the Grand Prix du Roman of the French Academy, the guardians of the French language, for his book “2084: The End of the World,” a dystopian novel inspired by George Orwell’s “Nineteen-Eighty Four” and set in an Islamist totalitarian world in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
The concerns about his reported arrest come as another prominent French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud is under attack over his novel “Houris,” which won France’s top literary prize, the Goncourt.
A woman has claimed the book was based on her story of surviving 1990s Islamist massacres and used without her consent.
She alleged on Algerian television that Daoud used the story she confidentially recounted to a therapist — who is now his wife — during treatment. His publisher has denied the claims.
The controversies are taking place in a tense diplomatic context between France and Algeria, after President Emmanuel Macron renewed French support for Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara during a landmark visit to the kingdom last month.
Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, is de facto controlled for the most part by Morocco.
But it is claimed by the Sahrawi separatists of the Polisario Front, who are demanding a self-determination referendum and are supported by Algiers.
Daoud organized a petition signed by fellow literary luminaries published in the Le Point weekly calling for Sansal’s “immediate” release.
“This tragic news reflects an alarming reality in Algeria, where freedom of expression is nothing more than a memory in the face of repression, imprisonment and the surveillance of the entire society,” said the letter also signed by the likes of British novelist Salman Rushdie and Turkish Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk.
Winter rain piles misery on Gaza’s displaced
GAZA CITY: At a crowded camp in Gaza for those displaced by the war between Israel and Hamas, Ayman Siam laid concrete blocks around his tent to keep his family dry as rain threatened more misery.
“I’m trying to protect my tent from the rainwater because we are expecting heavy rain. Three days ago when it rained, we were drenched,” Siam said, seeking to shield his children and grandchildren from more wet weather.
Siam is among thousands sheltering at Gaza City’s Yarmouk sports stadium in the north after being uprooted by the Israel-Hamas war.
He lives in one of many flimsy tents set up at the stadium, where the pitch has become a muddy field dotted with puddles left by rainfall that washed away belongings and shelters.
People in the stadium dug small trenches around their tents, covered them with plastic sheets, and did whatever they could to stop the water from entering their makeshift homes.
Others used spades to direct the water into drains, as grey skies threatened more rain.
The majority of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced, often multiple times.
With many displaced living in tent camps, the coming winter is raising serious concerns.
Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza’s civil defense agency, said that “tens of thousands of displaced people, especially in the central and south of Gaza Strip, are suffering from flooded tents due to the rains,” and called on the international community to provide tents and aid.
International aid organizations have sounded the alarm about the deteriorating situation as winter approaches.
“It’s going to be catastrophic,” warned Louise Wateridge, an emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees currently in Gaza.
The rainy period in Gaza lasts between late October and April, with January being the wettest month, averaging 30 to 40 millimeters of rain. Winter temperatures can drop as low as 6 degrees Celsius. Recent rain has flooded hundreds of tents.
“The rain and seawater flooded all the tents. We are helpless. The water took everything from the tent, including the mattresses, blankets and a water jug. We were only able to get a mattress and blankets for the children,” said Auni Al-Sabea, a displaced person.
Lebanese Prime Minister demands ‘immediate’ implementation of ceasefire
- Mikati said the intense wave of Israeli air strikes on Beirut on Tuesday “reaffirms that the Israeli enemy has no regard for any law or consideration"
BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati demanded in a statement on Tuesday that the international community “act swiftly” to halt Israeli aggression “and implement an immediate ceasefire.”
His comments came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address that his security cabinet would agree “this evening” on a truce deal in its war against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Mikati said the intense wave of Israeli air strikes on Beirut on Tuesday “reaffirms that the Israeli enemy has no regard for any law or consideration.”
“The international community is called upon to act swiftly to stop this aggression and implement an immediate ceasefire,” he said in his statement, which was issued before a strike hit the central Hamra commercial district.
Israeli ‘aggression’ targets Syria’s Homs countryside, state news agency says
- Blasts had been heard in the vicinity of Homs city and that the cause was under investigation
HOMS: Initial reports indicate that an Israeli “aggression” targeted two villages in northern and western areas of Syria’s Homs province, the Syrian state news agency said on Tuesday.
Earlier, Syrian state television said blasts had been heard in the vicinity of Homs city and that the cause was under investigation.
Israel has been carrying out strikes against Iran-linked targets in Syria for years but has ramped up such raids since the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel by Hamas-led militants.