‘No food, nothing’: Famine grips Sudan

‘No food, nothing’: Famine grips Sudan
People queue for water in Omdurman, the Sudanese capital's twin city, during battles between the Sudanese military forces and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), on January 17, 2025. (AFP)
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Updated 29 January 2025
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‘No food, nothing’: Famine grips Sudan

‘No food, nothing’: Famine grips Sudan
  • Country’s economy bludgeoned by war and mismanagement

CAIRO: Mona Ibrahim has already buried two of her children.

In the span of just two months, the Sudanese mother watched helplessly as severe malnutrition killed her 10-year-old daughter, Rania, and her eight-month-old son, Montasir, in the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp.

“I could only hold them as they faded away,” Ibrahim, 40, said via video call, sitting outside her straw-and-plastic shelter near North Darfur state’s besieged capital El-Fasher.

Rania was the first to succumb. In El-Fasher’s only functioning hospital, understaffed and unequipped, she died in November just three days after being admitted with acute diarrhea.

Her baby boy Montasir followed weeks later, his tiny body bloated from severe malnutrition.

El-Fasher, under paramilitary siege since May, is only one grim battlefield in the 21-month war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces.

In July, a UN-backed review declared famine in Zamzam, a decades-old displacement camp home to between 500,000 and a million people.

By December, it had spread to two more camps in the area, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam, as well as parts of the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification determined.

Now, Ibrahim fears for her four-year-old daughter, Rashida, who battles severe anemia with no access to medical care.

“I am terrified I will lose her too,” she said. “We’re abandoned. There is no food, no medicine, nothing.”

At Salam 56, one of Zamzam’s 48 overcrowded shelters, exhaustion was etched onto mothers’ faces as they cradled their children, too weak to stand.

Multiple families gathered around bowls with a few scraps of peanut residue traditionally used as animal feed. “It’s all we have,” said Rawiya Ali, a 35-year-old mother of five.

Contaminated water collects in a shallow reservoir during the rainy season, which the women trudge 3 km to fetch.

“Animals drink from it and so do we,” Ali said.

Salam 56 is home to over 700 families, according to its coordinator Adam Mahmoud Abdullah.

Since war began in April 2023, it has received only four food aid deliveries, the most recent in September, a mere 10 tonnes of flour, he said. “Since then, nothing has come,” Abdullah said.

The desolation in Zamzam lays bare the true cost of the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted over 12 million others, and created the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee. About 700 km southeast of Zamzam, the situation was just as dire.

Outside one of the last functioning community kitchens in the town of Dilling in South Kordofan state, queues stretched endlessly, according to Nazik Kabalo, who leads a Sudanese women’s rights group overseeing the kitchen.

Photos show men, women and children standing hollow-eyed and frail — their bellies swollen and skin pulled taut over fragile bones. 

After days without a single morsel, “some collapse where they stand,” Kabalo said. “For others, even when they get food ... they vomit it back up,” she said.

In South Kordofan state, where agriculture once thrived, farmers are eating seeds meant for planting, while others boil tree leaves in water to stave off hunger.

“We are seeing hunger in areas that have never seen famine in Sudan’s history,” Kabalo said.

With vast oil and gold reserves and fertile agricultural land, Sudan has had its economy bludgeoned by war and decades of mismanagement, and now, hunger is everywhere.


Israeli far-right minister confronts prominent Palestinian inmate

Israeli far-right minister confronts prominent Palestinian inmate
Updated 46 min 32 sec ago
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Israeli far-right minister confronts prominent Palestinian inmate

Israeli far-right minister confronts prominent Palestinian inmate
  • Marwan Barghouti, a leading member of the Palestinian Fatah party, has spent more than 20 years behind bars
  • Israel considers him a ‘terrorist’ and convicted him over his role in the second intifada, or uprising, from 2000-2005

JERUSALEM: Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir published a video on Friday in which he confronts the most high-profile Palestinian detainee in Israeli custody in his prison cell.

Marwan Barghouti, a leading member of the Palestinian Fatah party, has spent more than 20 years behind bars after being sentenced for his role in anti-Israeli attacks in the early 2000s.

In the clip published by Ben Gvir on X, the minister and two other individuals, including a prison guard, surround Barghouti in a corner of his cell.

“You will not defeat us. Whoever harms the people of Israel, whoever kills children, whoever kills women... we will erase them,” Ben Gvir says in Hebrew.

Barghouti tries to respond but is interrupted by Ben Gvir, who says: “No, you know this. And it’s been the case throughout history.”

The video does not specify where Barghouti is currently being held.

Contacted by AFP, sources close to Ben Gvir said the meeting took place “by chance” in Ganot prison in southern Israel during an inspection visit by the minister, but they would not say when the footage was filmed.

“This morning I read that various ‘senior officials’ in the Palestinian Authority didn’t quite like what I said to arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti – may his name be erased,” Ben Gvir said in the post accompanying the video on Friday morning.

“So I will repeat it again and again, without apology: whoever messes with the people of Israel, whoever murders our children, whoever murders our women – we will wipe them out. With God’s help.”

Barghouti, who is now in his sixties, was arrested in 2002 by Israel and sentenced to life in 2004 on murder charges.

Israel considers him a “terrorist” and convicted him over his role in the second intifada, or uprising, from 2000-2005.

He often tops opinion polls of popular Palestinian leaders and is sometimes described by his supporters as the “Palestinian Mandela.”

In a statement released by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry denounced “an unprecedented provocation” and described the confrontation as “organized state terrorism.”


Hezbollah chief warns Lebanon government it will not surrender its weapons

Hezbollah chief warns Lebanon government it will not surrender its weapons
Updated 15 August 2025
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Hezbollah chief warns Lebanon government it will not surrender its weapons

Hezbollah chief warns Lebanon government it will not surrender its weapons
  • Naim Qassem accuses government of ‘handing’ the country to Israel by pushing for the group’s disarmament
  • ‘The resistance will not surrender its weapons while aggression continues, occupation persists, and we will fight it’

BEIRUT: Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem on Friday accused Lebanon’s government of “handing” the country to Israel by pushing for the group’s disarmament, warning it would fight to keep its weapons.

Qassem spoke in a televised address after meeting Iran’s top security chief Ali Larijani, whose country has long backed the Lebanese militant group.

Hezbollah emerged badly weakened from last year’s war with Israel, and under US pressure the Lebanese government has ordered the army to devise a plan to disarm the group by the end of the year.

Iran, whose so-called “axis of resistance” includes Hezbollah, has also suffered a series of setbacks, most recently in the war with Israel that saw the United States strike its nuclear sites.

He also warned the Lebanese government against confronting the militant group, saying there would be “no life” in Lebanon in that event.

Qassem said Hezbollah and the Amal movement, its Shiite Muslim ally, had decided to delay any street protests against a US-backed disarmament plan as they still see room for dialogue with the Lebanese government. But he said any future protests could reach the US Embassy in Lebanon.

“The government is implementing an American-Israeli order to end the resistance, even if it leads to civil war and internal strife,” Qassem said.

“The resistance will not surrender its weapons while aggression continues, occupation persists, and we will fight it... if necessary to confront this American-Israeli project no matter the cost,” he said.

Qassem urged the government “not to hand over the country to an insatiable Israeli aggressor or an American tyrant with limitless greed.”


Libya to hold rare local vote in test for divided nation

Libya to hold rare local vote in test for divided nation
Updated 15 August 2025
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Libya to hold rare local vote in test for divided nation

Libya to hold rare local vote in test for divided nation
  • Rare municipal elections are seen as a test of democracy in a nation still plagued by division and instability
  • Key eastern cities — including Benghazi, Sirte and Tobruk — have rejected the vote, highlighting the deep rifts between rival administrations

TRIPOLI: Libya is set to hold rare municipal elections on Saturday, in a ballot seen as a test of democracy in a nation still plagued by division and instability.

Key eastern cities — including Benghazi, Sirte and Tobruk — have rejected the vote, highlighting the deep rifts between rival administrations.

The UN mission in Libya, UNSMIL, called the elections “essential to uphold democratic governance” while warning that recent attacks on electoral offices and ongoing insecurity could undermine the process.

“Libyans need to vote and to have the freedom to choose without fear and without being pressured by anyone,” said Esraa Abdelmonem, a 36-year-old mother of three.

“These elections would allow people to have their say in their day-to-day affairs,” she said, adding that it was “interesting to see” how the areas affected by the clashes in May would vote.

Since the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that toppled longtime leader Muammar Qaddafi, Libya has remained split between Tripoli’s UN-recognized government, led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah and its eastern rival administration backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

Khaled Al-Montasser, a Tripoli-based international relations professor, called the vote “decisive,” framing it as a test for whether Libya’s factions are ready to accept representatives chosen at the ballot box.

“The elections make it possible to judge whether the eastern and western authorities are truly ready to accept the idea that local representatives are appointed by the vote rather than imposed by intimidation or arms,” he said.

Nearly 380,000 Libyans, mostly from western municipalities, are expected to vote.

Elections had originally been planned in 63 municipalities nationwide — 41 in the west, 13 in the east, and nine in the south — but the High National Elections Commission (HNEC) suspended 11 constituencies in the east and south due to irregularities, administrative issues and pressure from local authorities.

In some areas near Tripoli, voting was also postponed due to problems distributing voter cards.

And on Tuesday, the electoral body said a group of armed men attacked its headquarters in Zliten, some 160 kilometers east of Tripoli.

No casualty figures were given, although UNSMIL said there were some injuries.

UNSMIL said the attack sought to “intimidate voters, candidates and electoral staff, and to prevent them from exercising their political rights to participate in the elections and the democratic process.”

National elections scheduled for December 2021 were postponed indefinitely due to disputes between the two rival powers.

Following Qaddafi’s death and 42 years of autocratic rule, Libya held its first free vote in 2012 to elect 200 parliament members at the General National Congress.

That was followed by the first municipal elections in 2013, and legislative elections in 2014 that saw a low turnout amid renewed violence.

In August that year, a coalition of militias seized Tripoli and installed a government with the backing of Misrata — then a politically influential city some 200 kilometers east of Tripoli — forcing the newly elected GNC parliament to relocate to the east.

The UN then brokered an agreement in December 2015 that saw the creation of the Government of National Accord, in Tripoli, with Fayez Al-Sarraj as its first premier, but divisions in the country have persisted still.

Other municipal elections did take place between 2019 and 2021, but only in a handful of cities.


Germany tells Israeli government to stop West Bank settlement construction

Germany tells Israeli government to stop West Bank settlement construction
Updated 15 August 2025
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Germany tells Israeli government to stop West Bank settlement construction

Germany tells Israeli government to stop West Bank settlement construction
  • Germany ‘firmly rejects the Israeli government’s announcements regarding the approval of thousands of new housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank’
  • Germany has repeatedly warned the Israeli government to stop settlement construction in the West Bank

BERLIN: Germany on Friday called on the Israeli government to stop settlement construction in the West Bank after Israel’s far-right finance minister said work would start on a plan for thousands of homes that would divide the Palestinian territory.

Germany “firmly rejects the Israeli government’s announcements regarding the approval of thousands of new housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank,” said a foreign ministry spokesperson in a statement.

Plans for the “E1” settlement and the expansion of Maale Adumim would further restrict the mobility of the Palestinian population in the West Bank by splitting it in half and cutting the area off from East Jerusalem, said the spokesperson.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced on Thursday that work would start on the long-delayed settlement, a move that his office said would “bury” the idea of a Palestinian state.

In a statement, Smotrich’s spokesperson said the minister had approved the plan to build 3,401 houses for Israeli settlers between an existing settlement in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Germany has repeatedly warned the Israeli government to stop settlement construction in the West Bank, which violates international law and UN Security Council resolutions.

Such moves complicate steps toward a negotiated two-state solution and end to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, said the spokesperson.


Turkiye detains Istanbul district mayor in corruption probe, state media says

Turkiye detains Istanbul district mayor in corruption probe, state media says
Updated 15 August 2025
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Turkiye detains Istanbul district mayor in corruption probe, state media says

Turkiye detains Istanbul district mayor in corruption probe, state media says
  • Turkish police detained 40 people including the mayor of Istanbul’s central Beyoglu district as part of a corruption investigation, state broadcaster TRT Haber said on Friday

ISTANBUL: Turkish police detained 40 people including the mayor of Istanbul’s central Beyoglu district as part of a corruption investigation, state broadcaster TRT Haber said on Friday, the latest wave in a crackdown on the opposition.

Beyoglu Mayor Inan Guney from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) was the 16th mayor to have been taken into custody in the crackdown, in which a total of more than 500 people have been detained in less than a year.

Among those currently in prison is Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, President Tayyip Erdogan’s main political rival, who is being investigated on charges of corruption and links to terrorism.

The CHP denies the charges and calls them an attempt to eliminate a democratic alternative, a charge the government rejects.

TRT Haber said those held in the latest operation are suspected of involvement in fraudulent activities at companies linked to the Istanbul municipality. Arrest warrants were issued for a total of 44 people, including the 40 detained, it said.

On Thursday, CHP mayor Ozlem Cercioglu from the western city of Aydin joined Erdogan’s ruling AK Party, citing disagreements with the CHP administration.

CHP leader Ozgur Ozel told reporters, without providing evidence, that AKP officials had threatened Cercioglu with legal investigations into her municipality and arrest unless she joined the ruling party.

AKP deputy chair Hayati Yazici called Ozel’s allegation “completely untrue.” Cercioglu also rejected the claim.