UNIFIL condemns ‘deliberate’ Israeli attacks, says destruction in Lebanese villages is shocking

A Lebanese Red Cross ambulance moves past armored vehicles of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon during their patrol around Marjayoun in south Lebanon on Oct. 8, 2024. (AFP)
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Updated 18 October 2024
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UNIFIL condemns ‘deliberate’ Israeli attacks, says destruction in Lebanese villages is shocking

  • UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti: We’ve been targeted several times, five times under deliberate attack’
  • ‘The devastation and destruction of many villages along the Blue Line, and even beyond, is shocking’

GENEVA: The UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon said on Friday it had come under several “deliberate” attacks by Israeli forces in recent days and efforts to help civilians in villages in the war zone were being hampered by Israeli shelling.

The UN mission, known as UNIFIL, is stationed in southern Lebanon to monitor hostilities along the demarcation line with Israel — an area that has seen fierce clashes this month between Israeli troops and Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters.

Two peacekeepers were wounded by an Israeli strike near a watchtower last week, prompting criticism from some of the 50 countries that provide troops to the 10,000-strong force.

“We’ve been targeted several times, five times under deliberate attack,” UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti said by video link from Beirut. “I think the role of UNIFIL at the moment is more important than ever. We need to be here.”

Israel says UN forces provide a human shield for Hezbollah fighters and has told UNIFIL to evacuate peacekeepers from southern Lebanon for their own safety — a request that it has refused.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected accusations the force had been deliberately targeted.

However, Tenenti challenged this, saying that in one of the incidents he described Israeli forces penetrated a UNIFIL site and remained there for 45 minutes.

Asked whether UNIFIL would consider defending itself against Israel, he said that it was an option but at the moment it was trying to reduce tensions.

Tenenti also voiced concerns about civilians remaining in southern Lebanon whom he said aid workers were struggling to reach because of ongoing Israeli shelling.

“The devastation and destruction of many villages along the Blue Line, and even beyond, is shocking,” he said, referring to a UN-mapped line separating Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Asked about the downing of a drone near a UNIFIL ship off the Lebanese coast on Thursday, he said: “The drone was coming from the south but circling around the ship and getting very, very close, a few meters away from the ship.”

An investigation is underway, he added.

Tenenti also said that an investigation several months ago had detected “a trace of the possible use of white phosphorous” by the Israeli army close to a UNIFIL base. The UN Security Council was aware of the case, he said.

White phosphorus munitions are not banned as a chemical weapon and their use — usually to make smoke screens, mark targets or burn buildings — by the Israeli military is documented.

However, since they can cause serious burns and start fires, international conventions prohibit their use against military targets located among civilians.

Israel’s military has previously said in response to Reuters questions that its primary smoke shells do not contain white phosphorous and those that do can be used to create smokescreens and that it “uses only lawful means of warfare.”


Sudan’s war-ravaged Khartoum tiptoes back to life after recapture by army

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Sudan’s war-ravaged Khartoum tiptoes back to life after recapture by army

  • In a lightning offensive in March, the army recaptured the city center, including the presidential palace and the airport
  • Within the next six months, the UN expects more than two million displaced people to return to the capital if security conditions allow
KHARTOUM: In war-ravaged Khartoum donkey carts clatter over worn asphalt, the smell of tomatoes wafts from newly reopened stalls and pedestrians dodge burnt-out cars left by two years of war.
Life is slowly, cautiously returning to the Sudanese capital, weeks after the army recaptured the city from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who had held it since soon after fighting erupted in April 2023.
Stallholder Maqbool Essa Mohamed was laying out his wares in the large market in the southern neighborhood of Kalakla.
“People feel safe again,” he said. “Business is moving and there’s security.”
Just weeks ago this market was deserted – shops shuttered, streets silent and snipers perched on rooftops.
In a lightning offensive in March, the army recaptured the city center, including the presidential palace and the airport, and the RSF was shed back into the western outskirts of greater Khartoum.
But the RSF remain within artillery range of the city center, as they demonstrated twice this week with a bombardment of the army’s General Command headquarters last Saturday followed by shelling of the presidential palace on Thursday.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 13 million.
In greater Khartoum alone, more than 3.5 million people have fled their homes, leaving entire neighborhoods abandoned.
Within the next six months, the UN expects more than two million displaced people to return to the capital if security conditions allow.
Kalakla, a neighborhood on the road to Jebel Awliya – once an RSF bastion – suffered heavily during the war.
Its location close to a military base made it a prime target, with RSF fighters encircling the area and cutting off food and water for the civilians trapped inside.
In July 2023 activists called it “uninhabitable.”
But now women can be seen on the roadside brewing tea – a common sight before the war – as a man dragging his suitcase stands beside a minibus, newly arrived in the war-torn neighborhood.
Public transport has yet to return to normal as fragile security conditions and crumbling infrastructure impede movement.
With buses packed to capacity, weary commuters climb atop vehicles, preferring the risky ride over an indefinite wait for the next bus – which may not come for hours.
From January, the army began advancing in the greater Khartoum area and by late March had wrested back control of both Khartoum and the industrial city of Khartoum North just across the Blue Nile.
Standing amid the wreckage of the presidential palace, army chief Burhan declared: “Khartoum is free.”
The paramilitaries are now confined to the southern and western outskirts of Omdurman, the third of the three cities that make up greater Khartoum.
Both sides in the conflict have been accused of war crimes, including deliberately targeting civilians and indiscriminately bombing residential neighborhoods.
The RSF in particular has been notorious for systematic sexual violence, ethnic cleansing and rampant looting.
“They left nothing,” said Mohamed Al-Mahdi, a longtime resident. “They destroyed the country and took our property.”
Today, Mahdi steers his bicycle through the recovering market, where vehicles, animal carts and pedestrians jostle for space under the wary eye of the army.
Earlier this month, Sudan’s state news agency reported that the army-backed government plans to restore the water supply to the area – a basic necessity still out of reach for many.
But for vendor Serelkhitm Shibti, the costs of the war are not about lost income or damaged infrastructure.
“What pains me is every drop of blood that fell in this land, not the money I lost,” he said.

Israeli military strikes near Syria’s presidential palace after warning over sectarian attacks

Updated 02 May 2025
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Israeli military strikes near Syria’s presidential palace after warning over sectarian attacks

DAMASCUS, Syria: Israel’s air force struck near Syria’s presidential palace early Friday hours after warning Syrian authorities not to march toward villages inhabited by members of a minority sect in southern Syria.
The strike came after days of clashes between pro-Syrian government gunmen and fighters who belong to the Druze minority sect near the capital, Damascus. The clashes left dozens of people dead or wounded.
The Israeli army said in a statement that fighter jets struck adjacent to the area of the Palace of President Hussein Al-Sharaa in Damascus. It gave no further details.
Pro-government Syrian media outlets said the strike hit close to the People’s Palace on a hill overlooking the city.
The Druze religious sect is a minority group that began as a 10th-century offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam. More than half of the roughly 1 million Druze worldwide live in Syria. Most of the other Druze live in Lebanon and Israel, including in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981. In Syria, they largely live in the southern Sweida province and some suburbs of Damascus.


US meets Syria’s top diplomat, urges action to protect Druze minority

Updated 02 May 2025
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US meets Syria’s top diplomat, urges action to protect Druze minority

  • State Department spokeswoman confirms meeting in New York between US and Syrian delegations

WASHINGTON: The United States on Thursday confirmed meeting Syria’s top diplomat and called on the interim authorities to take action on concerns, as violence flares against the Druze minority.
Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani last Friday raised his new country’s flag at the UN headquarters, marking a new chapter after the overthrowing in December of longtime ruler Bashar Assad.
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce confirmed that US representatives met the Syrian delegation in New York on Tuesday.
She said that the United States urged the post-Assad authorities to “choose policies that reinforce stability,” without providing any assessment on progress.
“Any future normalization of relations or lifting of sanctions... will depend on the interim authority’s actions and positive response to the specific confidence-building measures we have communicated,” Bruce told reporters.
The demands were in line with those set out in December by the United States, then led by president Joe Biden, and include protecting minorities and preventing a role in Syria by Assad’s ally Iran.
Since the Islamist fighters toppled Assad, sectarian clashes have repeatedly flared.
The spiritual leader of the Druze community on Thursday alleged a “genocidal campaign” after two days of violence left 102 people dead.
“We urge the interim authorities to hold perpetrators of violence and civilian harm accountable for their actions and ensure the security of all Syrians,” Bruce said of the violence against Druze.


Children broken in mind and body by Israeli ‘abomination’ in Gaza

Updated 01 May 2025
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Children broken in mind and body by Israeli ‘abomination’ in Gaza

  • UN health chief: ‘How much blood is enough?’
  • We can’t live like this, say Palestinians

GENEVA: Palestinian children in Gaza are being physically and mentally broken by two months of an Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid and incessant pounding by airstrikes, UN health chiefs said on Thursday.

More than 1,000 children had lost limbs, thousands had severe spinal cord and head injuries from which they would never recover and many were psychologically damaged, World Health Organization emergencies chief Mike Ryan said.

“We have to ask ourselves, how much blood is enough to satisfy whatever the political objectives are?” he said. “We are watching this unfold before our very eyes, and we’re not doing anything about it.
“We are breaking the bodies and minds of the children of Gaza. We are starving the children of Gaza. We are complicit. As a physician I am angry. It is an abomination.”
Israel has interrupted or blocked the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza since the war began in October 2023, and imposed a total blockade on March 2. Since then the UN has repeatedly warned of a humanitarian catastrophe on the ground, with famine looming, and it said this week that acute malnutrition among Gaza’s children was worsening.

Meanwhile Israel continues to pound civilians in Gaza with daily airstrikes and artillery bombardments. Civil defense chiefs said at least 29 Palestinians were killed on Thursday. They included eight who died in an airstrike on the Abu Sahlul family home in Khan Younis refugee camp, four killed in another strike on Al-Tuffah in Gaza City, and others who died in an attack on a tent sheltering displaced people near the central city of Deir Al-Balah.

“We came here and found all these houses destroyed, and children, women and young people all bombed to pieces,” survivor Ahmed Abu Zarqa said after a deadly strike in Khan Younis.
“This is no way to live. Enough, we’re tired, enough. We don’t know what to do with our lives any more. We’d rather die than live this kind of life.”


Several countries send firefighting planes to Israel to help tackle major wildfire

Updated 01 May 2025
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Several countries send firefighting planes to Israel to help tackle major wildfire

JERUSALEM: Several countries were sending firefighting aircraft to Israel on Thursday as crews battled for a second day to extinguish a wildfire that had shut down a major highway linking Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and sent drivers scrambling from their cars.

The fire broke out around midday on Wednesday, fueled by hot, dry conditions and fanned by strong winds that quickly whipped up the flames, burning through a pine forest. 

Several communities were evacuated as a precaution as the smoke turned the skies over Jerusalem gray.

The fire has burned about 20 sq. km and is the most significant fire Israel has had in the past decade, according to Tal Volvovitch, a spokesperson for Israel’s fire and rescue authority. 

She said the fire has “miraculously” not damaged any homes.

Israel’s fire and rescue authority warned the public to stay away from parks or forests, and to be exceptionally careful while lighting barbecues. 

Thursday is Israel’s Independence Day, which is typically marked with large family cookouts in parks and forests.

At least 12 people were treated in hospitals on Wednesday, mainly due to smoke inhalation, while another 10 people were treated in the field, Magen David Adom Ambulance services said.

Italy, Croatia, Spain, France, Ukraine, and Romania were sending planes to help battle the flames, while several other countries, including North Macedonia and Cyprus, were also sending water-dropping aircraft.

Israeli authorities said 10 firefighting planes were operating on Thursday morning, with another eight aircraft to arrive during the day.

Israel’s fire and rescue authority lifted the evacuation order on approximately a dozen towns in the Jerusalem hills on Thursday.

Three Catholic religious communities that were forced to evacuate from their properties on Wednesday could also return on Thursday, said Farid Jubran, the spokesperson for the Latin Patriarchate. 

He said their agricultural lands, including vineyards and olive trees, suffered heavy damage, and some buildings were damaged. 

But there were no injuries, and historic churches were not affected.

The main highway linking Jerusalem to Tel Aviv was opened again on Thursday, a day after the flames had encroached on the road, forcing drivers to abandon their cars and flee in terror. 

On Thursday morning, broad swathes of burned areas were visible from the highway, while pink anti-flame retardant dusted the top of burned trees and bushes. 

Smoke and the smell of fire hung heavy in the air.

In 2010, a massive forest fire burned for four days on northern Israel’s Mount Carmel, claiming 44 lives and destroying around 12,000 acres, much of it woodland.