TARTUS: Israeli strikes targeted military sites in Syria’s coastal Tartus region overnight, a war monitor said Monday, calling them “the heaviest strikes” there in years.
“Israeli warplanes launched strikes” targeting a series of sites including air defense units and “surface-to-surface missile depots,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
It said 18 raids “targeted strategic locations on the Syrian coast,” added the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside the country.
It called the raids “the heaviest strikes in Syria’s coastal region since the start of strikes in 2012.”
Tartus province also has a naval base belonging to Russia, a close ally of president Bashar Assad whom Islamist-forces ousted just over a week ago after capturing swathes of the country in a lightning offensive.
In the village of Bmalkah in the hills above Tartus, an AFP journalist saw roads filled with shattered glass and shreds of roller doors.
The force of blasts had stripped the leaves of olive trees in groves surrounding the village, and smoke still rose from nearby hillsides.
Residents told AFP that explosions began shortly after midnight and continued until almost 6:00 am (0300 GMT).
“It was like an earthquake. All the windows in my house were blown out,” said 28-year-old Ibrahim Ahmed, an employee in a legal office.
Clean-up crews sawed at fallen trees that had blocked the road to the next community. They also swept up missile and shell parts, even as the valley echoed to more blasts as pockets of stockpiled munitions caught fire.
“The village did not sleep last night. The kids were crying,” said one middle-aged man in a blue sweatshirt who refused to give his name.
“Most of the people had already left their homes toward the city, now they have lost their houses,” he added.
At a nearby military complex, smoke billowed from arched concrete bunkers cut into the hillside, and secondary explosions threw out shrapnel that fell among the trees.
Broken parts of mortars, rockets and missile launch tubes littered the hillsides.
According to the Observatory, 473 Israeli strikes have targeted military sites in Syria since the opposition alliance toppled Assad on December 8.
Syria war monitor says heavy Israeli strikes hit coastal region
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Syria war monitor says heavy Israeli strikes hit coastal region
- It called the raids “the heaviest strikes in Syria’s coastal region since the start of strikes in 2012.”
Israel says it will maintain control of Gaza-Egypt crossing
Israel also will approve the movement of all people and goods
RAFAH: Israel said it will maintain control of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip during the first phase of the ceasefire with Hamas.
A statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Wednesday denied reports that the Palestinian Authority would control the crossing.
The truce, now in its fourth day, is supposed to bring calm to the war-battered Gaza for at least six weeks and see 33 Hamas-held hostages released in return for hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
The statement said European Union monitors would supervise the crossing, which will be surrounded by Israeli troops. Israel also will approve the movement of all people and goods.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250. Around 100 hostages still remain in Gaza, after the rest were released, rescued, or their bodies were recovered.
Israel’s military campaign has killed over 47,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to local health authorities, who say women and children make up more than half of the fatalities but do not say how many of the dead were fighters. Israel says it killed over 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.
Algeria and US sign MoU on military cooperation, Algeria defense ministry says
- Defense ministry said the MoU focuses on military cooperation
ALGIERS: Algeria signed a memorandum of understanding with the United States on Wednesday that focuses on military cooperation, its defense ministry said in a statement.
The MoU was signed during a meeting between Deputy Defense Minister Said Chengriha and Michael Langley, commander of the US Africa Command, the ministry added.
WEF panel stresses correlation between environmental degradation and security
DUBAI: “Safeguarding Nature, Securing People” was the title of a panel gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday which discussed the connected issues of environmental degradation and security.
The discussion also highlighted the impact of land degradation, droughts, and extreme weather events on human and national security.
Ibrahim Thiaw, undersecretary-general of the UN and executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, moderated the session and opened by saying that in many countries, security concerns were focused on “national security, armed forces and intelligence services, but we know that the environment is also affecting us deeply.”
Ilwad Elman, chief operating officer of the Elman Peace Centre, said that only recently had we “begun to draw the strong correlation and the intersection of the two crises of human security and (that) caused by environmental stressors and environmental aggregation” and added: “In Somalia, “we find ourselves right at the nexus of that.”
She added that food and water insecurity posed not only environmental challenges but also had a “direct linkage to the desperation that yields young people particularly to be motivated to join armed groups” — not because they agreed with the ideology, but “to be able to survive.”
Elman explained the Elman Peace Centre works on “sustainable peace building” and “the rehabilitation and reintegration of young people.”
It focuses on climate resilience even though that is not its main mandate because “the environments we’re sending people back to are changing so rapidly our peace building interventions were not sustainable,” she said.
Such crises are not only limited to developing countries. Ukraine, which supplies food to 400 million people globally, was unable to do so due to the war, according to the country’s Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food Vitalii Koval.
Some 60 percent of Ukraine’s income comes from agrarian food exports, which has been drastically impacted. This, combined with the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, has had disastrous consequences for the country, he said.
Koval added: “It is very important that the world community should elaborate new mechanisms to respond, and these mechanisms need to be immediate — not tomorrow, not sometime in the future, (but) today.”
Conflicts undoubtedly exacerbate environmental stressors, but the opposite is also true.
Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir said: “Land degradation leads to conflicts, leads to violence, leads to extremism, leads to terrorism, leads to migration, leads to political instability, and leads to all of us paying an extremely high price to deal with the consequences of an issue that, had we paid attention to at the outset, would have cost us a fraction of the resources.”
The link between environmental degradation and security was “very clear, but we have not been paying sufficient attention to it,” he added.
Both Al-Jubeir and Elman said environmental and land degradation were not issues limited to desert or developing countries.
They pointed out the wildfires in California and the impact of such issues on declining water levels on Germany’s Rhine river and the Panama Canal. Drought has meant lower water levels, which means fewer ships can pass through, resulting in delays and increased shipping costs.
Elman also highlighted how the “discourse of climate change has only recently shifted from a very Global North perspective, overlooking the lived realities, the indigenous best practices and solutions from communities on the ground. Resources are distributed in a way that is, I would say, still very imperialistic.”
For example, Elman addressed a meeting of the UN Security Council on the effects of climate change on international peace and security in 2021. The resolution, put forth by Ireland and Niger, was vetoed despite 111 member states being in favor of it.
And so, she said, there was a need for “spaces that are able to move the agenda forward and recognize it as a security threat of global impact, and if the Security Council is not the place for that, other avenues need to be explored.”
Al-Jubeir responded: “If it’s not efficient enough, you do it unilaterally.”
Multilateralism was great for talks, he added, but “if those talks do not lead to concrete results, there should be nothing in the way of preventing countries who have the means to engage with other countries directly and put in place mechanisms that actually work.”
As an example, he said Saudi Arabia launched the Middle East Green Initiative that brought together over 22 countries in the region to help them adopt a circular carbon economy, along with other funding and knowledge-sharing programs that ensured a comprehensive approach.
Houthis announce the release of the Galaxy Leader ship's crew, transferring them to Oman
DUBAI: Yemen's Houthi rebels said Wednesday they released the crew of the Galaxy Leader, a ship they seized in November 2023 at the start of their campaign in the Red Sea corridor.
The rebels said they released the sailors after mediation by Oman.
The crew of 25 included mariners from the Philippines, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and Mexico.
The Iran-backed Houthi rebels said they hijacked the ship over its connection to Israel. They then had a campaign targeting ships in international waters, which only stopped with the recent ceasefire in Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Why is Israel launching a crackdown in the West Bank after the Gaza ceasefire?
- Prominent human rights groups call it a form of apartheid since the over 500,000 Jewish settlers in the territory have all the rights conferred by Israeli citizenship
In the days since a fragile ceasefire took hold in the Gaza Strip, Israel has launched a major military operation in the occupied West Bank and suspected Jewish settlers have rampaged through two Palestinian towns.
The violence comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces domestic pressure from his far-right allies after agreeing to the truce and hostage-prisoner exchange with the Hamas militant group. US President Donald Trump has, meanwhile, rescinded the Biden administration’s sanctions against Israelis accused of violence in the territory.
It’s a volatile mix that could undermine the ceasefire, which is set to last for at least six weeks and bring about the release of dozens of hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, most of whom will be released into the West Bank.
Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, and Palestinians want all three territories for their future state. Escalations in one area frequently spill over, raising further concerns that the second and far more difficult phase of the Gaza ceasefire — which has yet to be negotiated — may never come.
A rampage and a military raid
Dozens of masked men rampaged through two Palestinian villages in the northern West Bank late Monday, hurling stones and setting cars and property ablaze, according to local Palestinian officials. The Red Crescent emergency service said 12 people were beaten and wounded.
Israeli forces, meanwhile, carried out a raid elsewhere in the West Bank that the military said was in response to the hurling of firebombs at Israeli vehicles. It said several suspects were detained for questioning, and a video circulating online appeared to show dozens being marched through the streets.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military launched another major operation, this time in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, where its forces have regularly clashed with Palestinian militants in recent years, even before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack out of the Gaza Strip triggered the war there.
At least nine Palestinians were killed on Tuesday, including a 16-year-old, and 40 were wounded, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. The military said its forces carried out airstrikes and dismantled roadside bombs and “hit” 10 militants — though it was not clear what that meant.
Palestinian residents have reported a major increase in Israeli checkpoints and delays across the territory.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz cast the Jenin operation as part of Israel’s larger struggle against Iran and its militant allies across the region, saying “we will strike the octopus’ arms until they snap.”
The Palestinians view such operations and the expansion of settlements as ways of cementing Israeli control over the territory, where 3 million Palestinians live under seemingly open-ended Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority administering cities and towns.
Prominent human rights groups call it a form of apartheid since the over 500,000 Jewish settlers in the territory have all the rights conferred by Israeli citizenship. Israel rejects those allegations.
Netanyahu’s far-right partners are up in arms
Netanyahu has been struggling to quell a rebellion by his ultranationalist coalition partners since agreeing to the ceasefire. The agreement requires Israeli forces to withdraw from most of Gaza and release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners — including militants convicted of murder — in exchange for hostages abducted in the Oct. 7 attack.
One coalition partner, Itamar Ben-Gvir, resigned in protest the day the ceasefire went into effect. Another, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has threatened to bolt if Israel does not resume the war after the first phase of the ceasefire is slated to end in early March.
They want Israel to annex the West Bank and to rebuild settlements in Gaza while encouraging what they refer to as the voluntary migration of large numbers of Palestinians.
Netanyahu still has a parliamentary majority after Ben-Gvir’s departure, but the loss of Smotrich — who is also the de facto governor of the West Bank — would severely weaken his coalition and likely lead to early elections.
That could spell the end of Netanyahu’s nearly unbroken 16 years in power, leaving him even more exposed to longstanding corruption charges and an expected public inquiry into Israel’s failure to prevent the Oct. 7 attack.
Trump’s return could give settlers a freer hand
Trump’s return to the White House offers Netanyahu a potential lifeline.
The newly sworn-in president, who lent unprecedented support to Israel during his previous term, has surrounded himself with aides who support Israeli settlement. Some support the settlers’ claim to a biblical right to the West Bank because of the Jewish kingdoms that existed there in antiquity.
The international community overwhelmingly considers settlements illegal.
Among the flurry of executive orders Trump signed on his first day back in office was one rescinding the Biden administration’s sanctions on settlers and Jewish extremists accused of violence against Palestinians.
The sanctions — which had little effect — were one of the few concrete steps the Biden administration took in opposition to the close US ally, even as it provided billions of dollars in military support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, among the deadliest and most destructive in decades.
Trump claimed credit for helping to get the Gaza ceasefire agreement across the finish line in the final days of the Biden presidency.
But this week, Trump said he was “not confident” it would hold and signaled he would give Israel a free hand in Gaza, saying: “It’s not our war, it’s their war.”
