CAIRO: Ahmed Abdalla sat on a sidewalk in downtown Cairo, waiting for a bus that will start him on his journey back to Sudan. He doesn’t know what he’ll find in his homeland, wrecked and still embroiled in a 2-year-old war.
His wife and son, who weren’t going with him, sat next to him to bid him goodbye. Abdalla plans to go back for a year, then decide whether it’s safe to bring his family.
“There is no clear vision. Until when do we have to wait?” Abdalla said, holding two bags of clothes. “These moments I’m separating from my family are really hard,” he said, as his wife broke down in tears.
Abdullah is among tens of thousands of Sudanese who were driven from their homes and are now going back. They are hoping for some stability after the military in recent months recaptured the capital, Khartoum, and other areas from its rival, the Rapid Support Forces.
But the war still rages in some parts of the country. In areas recaptured by the military, people are returning to find their neighborhoods shattered, often with no electricity and scarce food, water and services.
The battle for power between the military and the RSF has caused one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Famine is spreading. At least 20,000 people have been killed, according to the UN, though the figure is likely higher.
Nearly 13 million people fled their homes, some four million of whom streamed into neighboring countries while the rest sought shelter elsewhere in Sudan.
Those returning find few services
A relatively small portion of the displaced are returning so far, but the numbers are accelerating. Some 400,000 internally displaced Sudanese have gone back to homes in the Khartoum area, neighboring Gezira province and southeast Sennar province, the International Organization for Migration estimates.
Since Jan. 1, about 123,000 Sudanese returned from Egypt, including nearly 50,000 so far in April, double the month before, the IOM said. Some 1.5 million Sudanese fled to Egypt during the war, according to UNHCR.
Nfa Dre, who had fled to northern Sudan, moved back with his family to Khartoum North, a sister city of the capital, right after the military retook it in March.
They found decomposing bodies and unexploded ordnance in the streets. Their home had been looted.
“Thank God, we had no loss of lives, just material losses, which matter nothing compared to lives,” Dre said. Three days of work made their home inhabitable.
But conditions are hard. Not all markets have reopened and few medical services are available. Dre said residents rely on charity kitchens operated by a community activist group called the Emergency Response Rooms, or ERR. They haul water from the Nile River for cooking and drinking. His home has no electricity, so he charges his phone at a mosque with solar panels.
“We asked the authorities for generators, but they replied that they don’t have the budget to provide them,” Dre said. “There was nothing we could say.”
Aid is lacking
Salah Semsaya, an ERR volunteer, said he knew of displaced people who tried returning to Wad Madani, the capital of Gezira province, but found the basics of life so lacking that they went back to their displacement shelters.
Others are too wary to try. “They’re worried about services for their children. They’re worrying about their livelihoods,” said Sheldon Yett, UNICEF Representative to Sudan.
Throughout the war, there has been no functional government. A military-backed transitional administration was based in Port Sudan, on the Red Sea coast, but had little reach or resources. After retaking Khartoum, the military said it will establish a new interim government.
The UN is providing cash assistance to some. UNICEF managed to bring several trucks of supplies into Khartoum. But aid remains limited, “and the scale of needs far exceeds available resources,” said Assadullah Nasrullah, communications officer at UNHCR Sudan.
Darfur and other areas remain violent
Sudanese in Egypt wrestle with the question of whether to return. Mohamed Karaka, who has been in Cairo with his family for nearly two years, told The Associated Press he was packing up to head back to the Khartoum area. But at the last minute, his elder brother, also in Egypt, decided it was not yet safe and Karaka canceled the trip.
“I miss my house and the dreams I had about building a life in Sudan. My biggest problem are my children. I didn’t want to raise them outside Sudan, in a foreign country,” said Karaka.
Hundreds of Sudanese take the two or three buses each day for southern Egypt, the first leg in the journey home.
Abdalla was among a number of families waiting for the midnight bus earlier this month.
He’s going back to Sudan but not to his hometown of El-Fasher in North Darfur province. That area has been and remains a brutal war zone between RSF fighters and army troops. Abdalla and his family fled early in the war as fighting raged around them.
“We miss every corner of our house. We took nothing with us when we left except two changes of clothes, thinking that the war would be short,” Abdalla’s wife, Majda, said.
“We hear bad news about our area every single day,” she said. “It’s all death and starvation.”
Abdalla and his family first moved to El-Gadarif in southeast Sudan before moving to Egypt in June.
He was heading back to El-Gadarif to see if it’s livable. Many of the schools there are closed, sheltering displaced people. If stability doesn’t take hold and schooling doesn’t resume, he said, his children will remain in Egypt.
“This is an absurd war,” Abdalla said. He pointed out how the RSF and military were once allies who together repressed Sudan’s pro-democracy movement before they turned on each other. “Both sides were unified at some point and hit us. When they started to differ, they still hit us,” he said.
“We only want peace and security and stability.”
Sudan war refugees return to find their homeland still wrecked by conflict
https://arab.news/j37x5
Sudan war refugees return to find their homeland still wrecked by conflict
- Tens of thousands of Sudanese who were driven from their homes and are now going back
- Nearly 13 million people fled their homes, some four million of whom streamed into neighboring countries
‘No Eid’ for West Bank residents who lost sons in Israeli raids
- An armored car arrived at the site shortly after, unloading soldiers to clear the cemetery of its mourners, who walked away solemnly without protest
JENIN: Abeer Ghazzawi had little time to visit her two sons’ graves for Eid Al-Adha before Israeli soldiers cleared the cemetery near the refugee camp in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
The Israeli army has conducted a months-long operation in the camp, which has forced Ghazzawi, along with thousands of other residents, from
her home.
For Ghazzawi, the few precious minutes she spent at her sons’ graves still felt like a small victory.
“On the last Eid — Eid Al-Fitr, celebrating the end of Ramadan in March — they raided us. They even shot at us. But this Eid, there was no shooting, just that they kicked us out of the cemetery twice,” said the 48-year-old.
“We were able to visit our land, clean up around the graves, and pour rosewater and cologne on them,” she added.
As part of the Eid celebrations, families traditionally visit the graves of their loved ones.
In the Jenin camp cemetery, women and men had brought flowers for their deceased relatives, and many sat on the side of their loved ones’ graves as they remembered the dead, clearing away weeds and dust.
An armored car arrived at the site shortly after, unloading soldiers to clear the cemetery of its mourners, who walked away solemnly without protest.
Ghazzawi’s two sons, Mohammed and Basel, were killed in January 2024 in a Jenin hospital by undercover Israeli troops.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group claimed the two brothers as its fighters after their deaths.
Like Ghazzawi, many in Jenin mourned sons killed during one of the numerous Israeli operations that have targeted the city, a known bastion of Palestinian armed groups fighting Israel.
In the current months-long military operation in the north of the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, Israeli forces looking for militants have cleared three refugee camps and deployed tanks in Jenin.
Mohammed Abu Hjab, 51, went to the cemetery on the other side of the city to visit the grave of his son, killed in January by an Israeli strike that also killed five other people.
“There is no Eid. I lost my son — how can it be Eid for me?” he asked as he stood by the six small gravestones of the dead young men.
Israel’s Netanyahu announces four soldiers killed in Gaza
- Netanyahu extended his condolences “to the families of our four fallen heroes in Gaza”
- The military said the four were killed in southern Gaza
JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Friday the deaths of four soldiers in Gaza, with local journalists who cover the military reporting they were all killed in a booby-trapped building.
Netanyahu extended his condolences “to the families of our four fallen heroes in Gaza in the fight to defeat Hamas and bring back our hostages,” naming two of the soldiers as Staff Sergeant Yoav Raver and reservist Sergeant Major Chen Gross.
“Our four fighters sacrificed their lives for the safety of all of us,” he added.
The names of the other two soldiers have not yet been cleared for publication, the military said.
Their deaths bring the number of Israeli soldiers killed since the start of the ground offensive in Gaza to 429.
The military said the four were killed in southern Gaza, with Israeli media reporting they were in
a house in the city of Khan Yunis when it exploded.
The army said another reserve officer was severely wounded in the same incident.
Israel recently stepped up its campaign in Gaza in what it says is a renewed push to defeat Hamas, whose October 7, 2023 attack sparked the war.
Israel army issues evacuation warning for parts of Gaza City
- The evacuation order comes at the beginning of the Eid Al-Adha holiday
- Israel has faced mounting pressure to allow more aid into Gaza
GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: The Israeli military issued an evacuation order for residents of parts of Gaza City on Friday ahead of an attack, as it presses an intensified campaign in the battered Palestinian territory.
“This is a final and urgent warning ahead of an impending strike,” army spokesman Avichay Adraee said.
The army “will strike all areas from which rockets are launched.”
The evacuation order comes at the beginning of the Eid Al-Adha holiday, one of the main religious festivals of the Muslim calendar.
The Israeli military has recently stepped up its campaign in Gaza in what it says is a renewed push to defeat Hamas, whose October 2023 attack sparked the war.
International calls for a negotiated ceasefire have grown in recent weeks.
Hamas’s lead negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya said on Thursday that the Palestinian Islamist group was ready to enter a new round of talks aimed at sealing a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Talks aimed at brokering a new ceasefire have failed to yield a breakthrough since the last brief truce fell apart in March with the resumption of Israeli operations in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas appeared close to an agreement late last month, but a deal proved elusive, with each side accusing the other of scuppering a US-backed proposal.
Israel has faced mounting pressure to allow more aid into Gaza, after it imposed a more than two-month blockade that led to widespread shortages of food and other essentials.
It recently eased the blockade and has worked with the newly formed, US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to implement a new aid distribution mechanism via a handful of centers in south and central Gaza.
But since its inception, the GHF has been a magnet for criticism from the UN and other members of the aid world — which only intensified following a recent string of deadly incidents near its facilities.
Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
According to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, at least 4,402 people have been killed since Israel resumed its offensive on March 18, taking the war’s overall toll to 54,677, mostly civilians.
Homes smashed, help slashed: no respite for returning Syrians
- The community center, funded by UNHCR, offers vital services that families cannot get elsewhere in a country scarred by war
- “We have no stability. We are scared and we need support,” said Fatima Al-Abbiad, a mother of four
DAMASCUS: Around a dozen Syrian women sat in a circle at a UN-funded center in Damascus, happy to share stories about their daily struggles, but their bonding was overshadowed by fears that such meet-ups could soon end due to international aid cuts.
The community center, funded by the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR), offers vital services that families cannot get elsewhere in a country scarred by war, with an economy broken by decades of mismanagement and Western sanctions.
“We have no stability. We are scared and we need support,” said Fatima Al-Abbiad, a mother of four. “There are a lot of problems at home, a lot of tension, a lot of violence because of the lack of income.”
But the center’s future now hangs in the balance as the UNHCR has had to cut down its activities in Syria because of the international aid squeeze caused by US President Donald Trump’s decision to halt foreign aid.
The cuts will close nearly half of the UNHCR centers in Syria and the widespread services they provide — from educational support and medical equipment to mental health and counselling sessions — just as the population needs them the most. There are hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees returning home after the fall of Bashar Assad last year.
UNHCR’s representative in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, said the situation was a “disaster” and that the agency would struggle to help returning refugees.
“I think that we have been forced — here I use very deliberately the word forced — to adopt plans which are more modest than we would have liked,” he told Context/Thomson Reuters Foundation in Damascus.
“It has taken us years to build that extraordinary network of support, and almost half of them are going to be closed exactly at the moment of opportunity for refugee and IDPs (internally displaced people) return.”
BIG LOSS
A UNHCR spokesperson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the agency would shut down around 42 percent of its 122 community centers in Syria in June, which will deprive some 500,000 people of assistance and reduce aid for another 600,000 that benefit from the remaining centers.
The UNHCR will also cut 30 percent of its staff in Syria, said the spokesperson, while the livelihood program that supports small businesses will shrink by 20 percent unless it finds new funding.
Around 100 people visit the center in Damascus each day, said Mirna Mimas, a supervisor with GOPA-DERD, the church charity that runs the center with UNHCR.
Already the center’s educational programs, which benefited 900 children last year, are at risk, said Mimas.
Nour Huda Madani, 41, said she had been “lucky” to receive support for her autistic child at the center.
“They taught me how to deal with him,” said the mother of five.
Another visitor, Odette Badawi, said the center was important for her well-being after she returned to Syria five years ago, having fled to Lebanon when war broke out in Syria in 2011.
“(The center) made me feel like I am part of society,” said the 68-year-old.
Mimas said if the center closed, the loss to the community would be enormous: “If we must tell people we are leaving, I will weep before they do,” she said
UNHCR HELP ‘SELECTIVE’
Aid funding for Syria had already been declining before Trump’s seismic cuts to the US Agency for International Development this year and cuts by other countries to international aid budgets.
But the new blows come at a particularly bad time.
Since former president Assad was ousted by Islamist rebels last December, around 507,000 Syrians have returned from neighboring countries and around 1.2 million people displaced inside the country went back home, according to UN estimates.
Llosa said, given the aid cuts, UNHCR would have only limited scope to support the return of some of the 6 million Syrians who fled the country since 2011.
“We will need to help only those that absolutely want to go home and simply do not have any means to do so,” Llosa said. “That means that we will need to be very selective as opposed to what we wanted, which was to be expansive.”
ESSENTIAL SUPPORT
Ayoub Merhi Hariri had been counting on support from the livelihood program to pay off the money he borrowed to set up a business after he moved back to Syria at the end of 2024.
After 12 years in Lebanon, he returned to Daraa in southwestern Syria to find his house destroyed — no doors, no windows, no running water, no electricity.
He moved in with relatives and registered for livelihood support at a UN-backed center in Daraa to help him start a spice manufacturing business to support his family and ill mother.
While his business was doing well, he said he would struggle to repay his creditors the 20 million Syrian pounds ($1,540) he owed them now that his livelihood support had been cut.
“Thank God (the business) was a success, and it is generating an income for us to live off,” he said.
“But I can’t pay back the debt,” he said, fearing the worst. “I’ll have to sell everything.”
Netanyahu admits Israel supporting anti-Hamas armed group in Gaza
- Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group Israel has been working with is part of a local Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab
JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that Israel is supporting an armed group in Gaza that opposes the militant group Hamas, following comments by a former minister that Israel had transferred weapons to it.
Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group Israel has been working with is part of a local Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR) think tank describes Abu Shabab as the leader of a “criminal gang operating in the Rafah area that is widely accused of looting aid trucks.”
Knesset member and ex-defense minister Avigdor Liberman had told the Kan public broadcaster that the government, at Netanyahu’s direction, was “giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons.”
“What did Liberman leak? That security sources activated a clan in Gaza that opposes Hamas? What is bad about that?” Netanyahu said in a video posted to social media on Thursday.
“It is only good, it is saving lives of Israeli soldiers.”
Michael Milshtein, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, told AFP that the Abu Shabab clan was part of a Bedouin tribe that spans across the border between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
Some of the tribe’s members, he said, were involved in “all kinds of criminal activities, drug smuggling, and things like that.”
Milshtein said that Abu Shabab had spent time in prison in Gaza and that his clan chiefs had recently denounced him as an Israeli “collaborator and a gangster.”
“It seems that actually the Shabak (Israeli security agency) or the (military) thought it was a wonderful idea to turn this militia, gang actually, into a proxy, to give them weapons and money and shelter” from army operations, Milshtein said.
He added that Hamas killed four members of the gang days ago.
The ECFR said Abu Shabab was “reported to have been previously jailed by Hamas for drug smuggling. His brother is said to have been killed by Hamas during a crackdown against the group’s attacks on UN aid convoys.”
Israel regularly accuses Hamas, with which it has been at war for nearly 20 months, of looting aid convoys in Gaza.
Hamas said the group had “chosen betrayal and theft as their path” and called on civilians to oppose them.
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, said it had evidence of “clear coordination between these looting gangs, collaborators with the occupation (Israel), and the enemy army itself in the looting of aid and the fabrication of humanitarian crises that deepen the suffering of” Palestinians.
The Popular Forces, as Abu Shabab’s group calls itself, said on Facebook it had “never been, and will never be, a tool of the occupation.”
“Our weapons are simple, outdated, and came through the support of our own people,” it added.
Milshtein called Israel’s decision to arm a group such as Abu Shabab “a fantasy, not something that you can really describe as a strategy.”
“I really hope it will not end with catastrophe,” he said.
