Iraq condemns Turkish military ‘incursions’ into north

PORT SUDAN: At least 33 people have been killed in Sudan in attacks blamed on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, at war with the army since April 2023, first responders said Saturday.
The attacks came after six straight days of RSF drone strikes on the army-led government’s wartime capital Port Sudan damaged key infrastructure including the power grid.
On Friday evening, at least 14 members of the same family were killed in an air strike on a displacement camp in the vast western region of Darfur, a rescue group said, blaming the paramilitaries.
The Abu Shouk camp “was the target of intense bombardment by the Rapid Support Forces on Friday evening,” said the group of volunteer aid workers, which also reported wounded.
“Fourteen Sudanese, members of the same family, were killed” and several people wounded, it said in a statement.
The camp near El-Fasher, the last state capital in Darfur still out of the RSF’s control, is plagued by famine, according to the United Nations.
It is home to tens of thousands of people who fled the violence of successive conflicts in Darfur and the conflict that has been tearing Africa’s third largest country apart since 2023.
The RSF has shelled the camp several times in recent weeks.
Abu Shouk is located near the Zamzam camp, which the RSF seized in April after a devastating offensive that virtually emptied it.
The United Nations says nearly one million people had been sheltering at the site.
On Saturday, an RSF strike on a prison in the army-controlled southern city of El-Obeid killed at least 19 people and wounded 45, a medical source said.
The source told AFP that the jail in the North Kordofan state capital was hit by a RSF drone.
The war, which began as a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has spiralled into what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
It has effectively divided the country in two with the army controlling the north, east and center while the RSF and its allies dominate nearly all of Darfur in the west and parts of the south.

GENEVA: The world could be witnessing “another Nakba” expulsion of Palestinians, a United Nations committee warned Friday, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and saying it was inflicting “unimaginable suffering” on Palestinians.

For Palestinians, any forced displacement evokes memories of the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement in the war that accompanied to Israel’s creation in 1948.

“Israel continues to inflict unimaginable suffering on the people living under its occupation, whilst rapidly expanding confiscation of land as part of its wider colonial aspirations,” warned a UN committee tasked with probing Israeli practices affecting Palestinian rights.

“What we are witnessing could very well be another Nakba,” it said, after concluding an annual mission to Amman.

During the 1948 war, around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what became known as “the Nakba.”

The descendants of some 160,000 Palestinians who managed to remain in what became Israel presently make about 20 percent of its population.

The UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories was established by the UN General Assembly in December 1968.

The committee is currently composed of the Sri Lankan, Malaysian and Senegalese ambassadors to the UN in New York.

“What the world is witnessing could very well be a second Nakba. The goal of wider colonial expansion is clearly the priority of the government of Israel,” they said in their report.

“Security operations are used as a smokescreen for rapid land grabbing, mass displacement, dispossession, demolitions, forced evictions and ethnic cleansing, in order to replace the Palestinian communities with Jewish settlers.”