DAMASCUS: The United Nations special envoy for Syria on Sunday called for a quick end to Western sanctions after the ouster of President Bashar Assad.
The Syrian government has been under strict sanctions by the United States, European Union and others for years as a result of Assad’s brutal response to what began as peaceful anti-government protests in 2011 and later spiraled into a civil war.
The conflict has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million. Rebuilding has been stymied to a large degree by sanctions that aimed to prevent rebuilding of damaged infrastructure and property in government-held areas in the absence of a political solution.
“We can hopefully see a quick end to the sanctions so that we can see really a rallying around building of Syria,” UN envoy Geir Pedersen told reporters during a visit to Damascus.
Pedersen came to the Syrian capital to meet with officials with the new interim government set up by the former opposition forces who toppled Assad, led by the Islamic militant group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, or HTS.
HTS is designated a terrorist group by the US, which could also complicate reconstruction efforts, but officials in Washington have indicated that the Biden administration is considering removing the designation.
The interim government is set to govern until March, but it has not yet made clear the process under which a new permanent administration would replace it.
“We need to get the political process underway that is inclusive of all Syrians,” Pedersen said. “That process obviously needs to be led by the Syrians themselves.”
He called for “justice and accountability for crimes” committed during the war and for the international community to step up humanitarian aid.
UN special envoy for Syria calls for sanctions relief following Assad’s fall
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UN special envoy for Syria calls for sanctions relief following Assad’s fall
- The Syrian government has been under strict sanctions by the US, EU and others for years
- ‘We can hopefully see a quick end to the sanctions so that we can see really a rallying around building of Syria’
Israel PM picks ex-navy commander as new security chief
- Former navy commander Eli Sharvit would be the next head of Shin Bet
- Netanyahu’s government moved to oust agency chief Ronen Bar on March 21
“After conducting in-depth interviews with seven worthy candidates, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to appoint former Israel navy commander, Vice-Admiral Eli Sharvit as the next director of the ISA (Shin Bet),” his office said in a statement.
It said Sharvit had served in the military for 36 years, including five years as navy commander.
“In that position, he led the force building of the maritime defense of the territorial waters and conducted complex operations against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran,” the statement said.
Netanyahu’s government moved to oust agency chief Ronen Bar on March 21, after previously citing an “ongoing lack of trust.”
But after petitions filed by Israel’s opposition and a non-governmental organization, the supreme court suspended the government’s dismissal of Bar.
According to the court, the freeze will remain in place until the appeals are presented before April 8.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara had said immediately after the March 21 ruling that Netanyahu was “prohibited” from appointing a new Shin Bet chief.
But Netanyahu insisted it was up to his government to decide who heads the domestic security agency.
Bar’s relationship with the Netanyahu government was strained after he blamed the executive for the security fiasco of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
It was further strained by a Shin Bet investigation into a case dubbed in media reports as “Qatargate” over alleged covert payments to a Netanyahu aide from Qatar.
‘Waited for death’: Ex-detainees recount horrors of Sudan’s RSF prisons
- Mouawad and Aziz were among several Egyptian traders imprisoned RSF paramilitaties when the Sudan civil war broke out in April 2023
- Along with thousands of other detainees, they were beaten, flogged, electrocuted or forced into backbreaking labor
KAFR ABU SHANAB, Egypt: For almost two years, Emad Mouawad had been repeatedly shuttled from one Sudanese paramilitary-run detention center to another, terrified each day would be his last.
The 44-year-old Egyptian merchant spent years selling home appliances in neighboring Sudan before fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stormed his Khartoum home in June 2023, taking him and six others into custody.
“They accused us of being Egyptian spies,” he told AFP, back home in Kafr Abu Shanab, a quiet village in Egypt’s Fayoum governorate southwest of Cairo.
The RSF has accused Egypt of involvement in the war, which Cairo has denied.
“We were just traders, but to them, every Egyptian was a suspect,” said Mouawad, recalling how his captors searched their phones and home.
They found nothing, but that did not spare the group, who were blindfolded, crammed into a truck and driven to one of the RSF’s many detention sites in Khartoum.
It was two months into the RSF’s war with the army, and hundreds of thousands of people had already fled to the Egyptian border, seeking safety.
“We couldn’t just go and leave our things to be looted,” said Mouawad.
“We had debts to pay, we had to guard our cargo at any cost.”
Cell without windows
In a university building-turned-prison in the Sudanese capital’s Riyadh district, Mouawad was confined with eight other Egyptians in a three-by-three-meter (10-by-10-feet) cell without any windows.
Other cells held anywhere between 20 and 50 detainees, he said, including children as young as six and elderly men, some of them in their 90s.
Food, when it came, “wasn’t food,” said Ahmed Aziz, another Egyptian trader detained with Mouawad.
“They would bring us hot water mixed with wheat flour. Just sticky, tasteless paste,” Aziz told AFP.
Water was either brackish and polluted from a well, or silt-filled from the Nile.
Disease spread unchecked, and many did not survive.
“If you were sick, you just waited for death,” Aziz said.
According to Mouawad, “people started losing their immunity, they became nothing but skeletons.”
“Five — sometimes more, sometimes fewer — died every day.”
Their bodies were often left to rot in the cells for days, their fellow detainees laying beside them.
And “they didn’t wash the bodies,” Mouawad said, an important Muslim custom before a dignified burial.
Instead, he heard that the paramilitaries just “dumped them in the desert.”
Living nightmare
Mouawad and Aziz were among tens of thousands vanished into prisons run by both the RSF and the rival Sudanese army, according to a UN report issued earlier this month.
Since the war began in April 2023, activists have documented the detention and torture of frontline aid workers, human rights defenders and random civilians.
The UN report said the RSF has turned residential buildings, police stations and schools into secret prisons.
Often snatched off the streets, detainees were beaten, flogged, electrocuted or forced into backbreaking labor.
The army has also been accused of torture, including severe beatings and electric shocks.
Neither the army nor the RSF responded to AFP requests for comment.
Soba, an infamous RSF prison in southern Khartoum, may have held more than 6,000 detainees by mid-2024, the UN said.
Aziz, who was held there for a month, described a living nightmare.
“There were no toilets, just buckets inside the cell that would sit there all day,” he said.
“You couldn’t go two weeks without falling sick,” Aziz added, with rampant fevers spreading fear of cholera and malaria.
At night, swarms of insects crawled over the prisoners.
“There was nothing that made you feel human,” said Aziz.
Mohamed Shaaban, another Egyptian trader, said RSF guards at Soba routinely insulted and beat them with hoses, sticks and whips.
“They stripped us naked as the day we were born,” Shabaan, 43, told AFP.
“Then they beat us, insulted and degraded us.”
RSF war crimes
Both the RSF and the army have been accused of war crimes, including torturing civilians.
Mohamed Osman, a Sudanese researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that while “the army at least has a legal framework in place,” the RSF “operates with complete impunity.”
The paramilitary force “runs secret facilities where people are taken and often never seen again,” Osman told AFP.
Despite their ordeals, Mouawad, Aziz and Shaaban were among the luckier ones, being released after 20 months in what they believe was a joint intelligence operation between Egypt and Sudan’s army-aligned authorities.
Finally back home in Egypt, they are struggling to recover, both physically and mentally, “but we have to try to turn the page and move on,” said Shaaban.
“We have to try and forget.”
Palestinian patients in Gaza dying due to lack of medical supplies, equipment: American surgeon
- Dr. Mark Perlmutter spent three weeks treating patients in Al-Aqsa and Nasser hospitals
- He was inside Nasser Hospital when Israeli airstrike targeted Hamas finance chief Ismail Barhoum
LONDON: An American surgeon working in Gaza has described the dire conditions in hospitals, saying Palestinian patients have died due to a lack of medical supplies and equipment.
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, who spent three weeks treating patients in Al-Aqsa and Nasser hospitals, told the BBC that doctors are operating without soap, antibiotics or X-ray facilities.
“The small community hospital, Al-Aqsa, is a tenth the size of any of the facilities in my home state — maybe smaller — and it did well to manage those horrible injuries,” he told the broadcaster following his second trip to the Palestinian enclave.
“Nevertheless, because of lack of equipment, many, many of those patients died, who would certainly not have died at a better-equipped hospital.”
He described treating severely wounded children, including a 15-year-old girl hit by Israeli machinegun fire while riding her bicycle and a boy, the same age, who was in a car with his grandmother after receiving warnings to evacuate from the north.
“They were both macerated and shredded by Apache gunships,” Perlmutter said. “The girl will be lucky if she keeps three of her limbs.”
Perlmutter was inside Nasser Hospital when an Israeli airstrike targeted Hamas finance chief Ismail Barhoum.
He said Barhoum was receiving medical treatment and had a right to protection under the Geneva Convention. The Israeli military said he was in the hospital “in order to commit acts of terrorism.”
With most hospitals in Gaza barely functioning, Perlmutter praised the commitment and dedication of the Palestinian medical staff, which he said go above and beyond the efforts of foreign doctors like himself.
“They all abandon their families, they volunteer and often work without pay. We get to go home in a month, which they don’t,” he said.
The UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, has called the situation in Gaza “dire,” noting that humanitarian aid remains blocked at border crossings.
Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children in Gaza, the Hamas-run Health Ministry has said, adding that since Israel broke a ceasefire and resumed its strikes on March 18, 921 Palestinians have been killed.
Perlmutter warned that if the Israeli attacks continue, hospitals operating without urgent medical supplies will see more wounded Palestinians die from treatable injuries.
Lebanon makes arrests over rockets fired at Israel
- Lebanon’s General Security agency said it had “arrested a number of suspects, and the relevant authorities have begun investigations with them”
BEIRUT: Lebanese authorities said Sunday several suspects had been arrested after rockets were fired at neighboring Israel earlier this month, testing a fragile November ceasefire.
Lebanon’s General Security agency said it had “arrested a number of suspects, and the relevant authorities have begun investigations with them to determine responsibility and take the appropriate legal measures.”
Militant group Hezbollah, which fought a devastating war with Israel last year, has denied involvement in the rocket fire that took place on March 22 and 28.
It however prompted an Israeli strike on Hezbollah’s Beirut stronghold for the first time since the truce went into effect in November.
Gaza rescuers say recovered 15 bodies after Israel fire on ambulances
- Bodies of eight medics from the Red Crescent, six members of Gaza’s civil defense agency and one employee of a UN agency were retrieved
- One medic from the Red Crescent remains missing
GAZA CITY: The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Sunday it had recovered the bodies of 15 rescuers killed a week ago when Israeli forces targeted ambulances in the Gaza Strip.
Bodies of eight medics from the Red Crescent, six members of Gaza’s civil defense agency and one employee of a UN agency were retrieved, the Red Crescent said in a statement.
It said one medic from the Red Crescent remained missing.
The group said the those killed “were targeted by the Israeli occupation forces while performing their humanitarian duties as they were heading to the Hashashin area of Rafah to provide first aid to a number of people injured by Israeli shelling in the area.”
“The occupation’s targeting of Red Crescent medics ... can only be considered a war crime punishable under international humanitarian law, which the occupation continues to violate before the eyes of the entire world.”
In an earlier statement the Red Crescent said the bodies “were recovered with difficulty as they were buried in the sand, with some showing signs of decomposition.”
Gaza’s civil defense agency also confirmed that 15 bodies had been recovered, adding that the deceased UN employee was from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, also known as UNRWA.
The incident occurred on March 23 in Rafah city’s Tal Al-Sultan neighborhood, close to the Egyptian border, just days after the military resumed its bombardments of Gaza following an almost two-month-long truce.
On Saturday, the Red Crescent had accused Israeli authorities of refusing to allow search operations to locate its crew.
The Israeli military acknowledged its troops had opened fire on ambulances.
It told AFP in a statement this week that its forces had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists.”
“A few minutes afterwards, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops” who “responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles,” it said, adding that several “terrorists” were killed.
“Some of the suspicious vehicles... were ambulances and fire trucks,” the military statement said, citing “an initial inquiry” into the incident.
It condemned “the repeated use” by “terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes.”
Tom Fletcher, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that since resumption of hostilities on March 18, Israeli air strikes have hit “densely populated areas,” with “patients killed in their hospital beds. Ambulances shot at. First responders killed.”
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Saturday that at least 921 people have been killed in the Palestinian territory since Israel resumed its large-scale strikes.
