WASHINGTON: US Senator Bernie Sanders said on Thursday he would force votes next week on resolutions that would block $8.8 billion in arms sales to Israel, citing the human rights crisis faced by Palestinians in Gaza after Israel’s bombardment of the enclave and its suspension of aid deliveries.
“(Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu has clearly violated US and international law in this brutal war, and we must end our complicity in the carnage,” Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said in a statement announcing his plan.
More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli campaign in Gaza, Palestinian officials say. It was launched after thousands of Hamas-led gunmen attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and abducting 251 as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, leaving hundreds of thousands of people sheltering in tents or bombed-out buildings.
A decades-long tradition of strong bipartisan support for Israel in the US Congress means resolutions to stop weapons sales are unlikely to pass, but backers hope that raising the issue will encourage Israel’s government and US administrations to do more to protect civilians.
“No humanitarian aid has entered Gaza in more than three and a half weeks since Israeli authorities announced a complete blockade – that’s no food, water, medicine, or fuel since the start of March,” Sanders said in a statement.
Last month, the UN Human Rights Chief accused Israel on Wednesday of showing an unprecedented disregard for human rights in its military actions in Gaza and said Hamas had violated international law.
The Senate voted overwhelmingly in November to block three resolutions introduced by Sanders that would have halted transfers of weapons approved by the administration of then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat whom progressives criticized as doing too little to help Palestinians as conditions in Gaza worsened.
President Donald Trump, who began a second term on Jan. 20 and is a fierce advocate for Israel, has reversed Biden’s efforts to place some limits on what arms are sent to Netanyahu’s government.
Last month, Trump sidestepped the congressional review process to approve billions of dollars in military sales to Israel.
US law gives Congress the right to stop major foreign weapons sales by passing resolutions of disapproval. Although no such resolution has both passed Congress and survived a presidential veto, the law requires the Senate to vote if a resolution is filed. Such resolutions have at times led to angry debates embarrassing to past presidents.
US Senator Sanders to force Senate votes on blocking arms for Israel
https://arab.news/2e63f
US Senator Sanders to force Senate votes on blocking arms for Israel
- "Netanyahu has clearly violated US and international law in this brutal war, and we must end our complicity in the carnage,” Sanders said in a statement announcing his plan
’Waited for death’: Ex-detainees recount horrors of Sudan’s RSF prisons
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.
Jordanian authorities arrest 10 drug traffickers in major anti-narcotics operations
- Among most significant arrests was that of notorious suspected synthetic cannabis dealer in Irbid Governorate
AMMAN: Jordan’s Anti-Narcotics Department arrested 10 alleged drug traffickers and smugglers in five high-profile cases as part of an ongoing crackdown on drug-related crimes across the country, a spokesperson for the Public Security Directorate announced on Sunday.
Among the most significant arrests was that of a notorious suspected synthetic cannabis dealer in Irbid Governorate.
Authorities also detained three individuals said to be involved in the production and distribution of the potent “Joker” drug, which is a synthetic cannabinoid, also known as a neocannabinoid, which are designer drugs that mimic the effects of cannabis.
A raid on the main suspect’s apartment led to the seizure of 6 kg of the substance, along with hazardous chemicals used in its manufacture. Three additional suspects were arrested in Ramtha District on suspicion of assisting in the operation.
In Aqaba Governorate, an alleged drug dealer was apprehended in possession of 60 hashish pills, while another suspected trafficker in Madaba Governorate was caught with 10 palm-sized sheets of hashish, a quantity of crystal meth, and a weapon after resisting arrest.
Meanwhile, authorities in Mafraq Governorate arrested an individual found with half a kilogram of crystal meth.
Additionally, security forces intercepted a suspicious package arriving in Amman from an unamed neighboring country. Upon inspection, they discovered 10,000 narcotic pills. Further investigations led to the arrest of three individuals connected to the case.
The Public Security Directorate reaffirmed its commitment to combating drug trafficking and bringing perpetrators to justice, emphasizing that efforts to dismantle criminal networks will continue nationwide, Jordan News Agency reported.
