Hundreds of fleeing families sleep on beaches and streets after Israel’s strikes shake Beirut

Families gather in Martyrs' square after fleeing the Israeli airstrikes in Beirut's southern suburbs, Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024. (AP)
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Updated 29 September 2024
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Hundreds of fleeing families sleep on beaches and streets after Israel’s strikes shake Beirut

  • Lines of people trudged up to the mountains above the Lebanese capital, holding infants and a few belongings

BEIRUT: Smoke was still rising from Beirut’s southern suburbs Saturday morning, visible to many of the families who had fled their homes there the night before to escape Israel’s massive bombardment.
It had been a harrowing night — getting out amid earthshaking explosions, looking in vain for space in one of the overflowing schools-turned-shelters. By the morning, hundreds of families were sleeping in public squares, on beaches or in cars around Beirut.
Lines of people trudged up to the mountains above the Lebanese capital, holding infants and a few belongings.
Overnight, Israel unleashed a series of strikes on various parts of Dahiyeh, the predominantly Shiite collection of suburbs on Beirut’s southern edge where tens of thousands of residents live. The biggest blasts to hit Beirut in nearly a year of conflict killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, Friday.
The assault was part of a rapid escalation of Israeli strikes the past week that has killed more than 700 people in Lebanon. Israel has vowed to cripple Hezbollah and put an end to 11 months of its fire onto Israeli territory in what Nasrallah described as a “support front” for his ally Hamas in Gaza.
The newly displaced swell the numbers Beirut is absorbing
The people escaping Friday night’s mayhem joined tens of thousands who have fled to Beirut and other areas of southern Lebanon the past week to escape Israel’s bombardment.
For many residents of Dahiyeh, the forced evacuation was disconcertingly familiar.
Some were Lebanese who had lived through the bruising monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, when Israel leveled large parts of the Beirut suburbs. Others were Syrians who had taken refuge from the long civil war in their own country.
Fatima Chahine, a Syrian refugee, slept on the Ramlet Al-Bayda public beach in Beirut with her family and hundreds of strangers. The night before she, her husband and their two children had piled onto a motorcycle and raced out of Dahiyeh, with “bombing below us and strikes above us.”
“Thank God, no one was wounded,” she said.
The government has opened up schools in Beirut to take in the displaced. But Syrians have reported that some sites turn them away to reserve the few spaces for Lebanese. Chahine said her family came directly to the beach.
“We only want a place where our children won’t be afraid,” she said. “We fled from the war in Syria in 2011 because of the children and we came here, and now the same thing is happening again.”
Since Monday, some 22,331 Syrians in Lebanon have crossed back into Syria, along with 22,117 Lebanese, according to Lebanese authorities.
Chahine said returning is not an option for her family; she is from an opposition area and so could face reprisals from the Syrian government.
At the beach, the displaced were spread out over the sidewalk or in cars parked by the curb. Others were camped out in beach pagodas or on blankets in the sand.
“We spent more than three hours going in circles between schools and shelters and we didn’t find one with room,” said Talal Ahmad Jassaf, a Lebanese man who slept on the beach with his family. He said he is considering going to the relative safety of Syria. But he worries about airstrikes on the road between Beirut and Damascus.
Some people are left without aid

The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, said this week’s escalation had more than doubled the number of people displaced by the conflict in Lebanon. There are now over 211,000 people displaced, including some of the humanitarian workers who should be responding to the crisis, it said. Around 85,000 of them are sleeping in shelters, it said.
“Humanitarian capacities to respond have been severely overstretched,” it added.
Displaced people sleeping outside in Beirut largely told The Associated Press that they had not received assistance from any humanitarian organization.
A stadium in the seaside neighborhood of Manara owned by the Nejmeh soccer club opened its doors to the displaced, who spent the night sleeping on bleachers.
Among them was Mariam Darwish, her husband and five children. She fled her home in Dahiyeh earlier in the week when the first Israeli strikes hit there.
Darwish said they had received water from the soccer club but that no organization had brought food, blankets or other supplies.
“People are helping each other out, family and friends are getting things for each other,” she said.
She and her husband had fled during the 2006 war, when their oldest son was a baby, and returned to their home when the war ended. They hope their house will still be standing to return to this time, she said.
“We’re worried about our children and the schools, that they’ll lose out on their future,” she said. “What can we do? We can only say thank God.”
She added, “May the resistance be victorious.” At the time of the interview, Hezbollah had not yet confirmed Nasrallah’s death.
Despite their battered-down circumstances, others also struck a defiant tone.
Jamal Hussein fled Dahiyeh at 3 a.m. with his extended family amid ongoing bombing and spent the night sleeping on the seaside promenade in Beirut’s upscale Ain Mreisseh district.
“Of course we aren’t afraid for ourselves, but we have children,” he said. “We are steadfast and ready to sacrifice more than this.”


Darfur civilians ‘face mass atrocities and ethnic violence’

Updated 10 sec ago
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Darfur civilians ‘face mass atrocities and ethnic violence’

  • Medical charity warns of new threat from escalation in fighting in Sudan civil war

KHARTOUM: Civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan face mass atrocities and ethnic violence in the civil war between the regular army and its paramilitary rivals, the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres warned on Thursday.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have sought to consolidate their power in Darfur since losing control of the capital Khartoum in March. Their predecessor, the Janjaweed militia, was accused of genocide in Darfur two decades ago.

The paramilitaries have intensified attacks on El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state which they have besieged since May 2024 in an effort to push the army out of its final stronghold in the region.
“People are not only caught in indiscriminate heavy fighting ... but also actively targeted by the Rapid Support Forces and their allies, notably on the basis of their ethnicity,” said Michel-Olivier Lacharite, Medecins Sans Frontieres’ head of emergencies. There were “threats of a full-blown assault,” on El-Fasher, which is home to hundreds of thousands of people largely cut off from food and water supplies and deprived of access to medical care, he said.


Egypt on alert as giant dam in Ethiopia completed

Updated 13 min 58 sec ago
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Egypt on alert as giant dam in Ethiopia completed

ADDIS ABABA: Ethiopia moved on Thursday to reassure Egypt about its water supply after completing work on a controversial giant $4 billion dam on the Blue Nile.

“To our neighbors downstream, our message is clear: the dam is not a threat, but a shared opportunity,” Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said.

“The energy and development it will generate stand to uplift not just Ethiopia. We believe in shared progress, shared energy, and shared water. Prosperity for one should mean prosperity for all.”

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is 1.8 km wide and 145 meters high, and is Africa's largest hydroelectric project. It can hold 74 billion cubic meters of water and generate more than 5,000 megawatts of power — more than double Ethiopia’s current output. It will begin full operations in September.

Egypt already suffers from severe water scarcity and sees the dam as an existential threat because the country relies on the Nile for 97 percent of its water. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Sudan’s leader Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan met last week and “stressed their rejection of any unilateral measures in the Blue Nile basin.” They were committed to safeguarding water security in the region, Sisi’s spokesman said.


Explosive drone intercepted near Irbil airport in northern Iraq, security statement says

Updated 03 July 2025
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Explosive drone intercepted near Irbil airport in northern Iraq, security statement says

  • The “Flight operations at the airport continued normally,” the Irbil airport authority said

IRBIL, Iraq: An explosive drone was shot down near Irbil airport in northern Iraq on Thursday, the Iraqi Kurdistan’s counter-terrorism service said in a statement.

There were no casualties reported, according to two security sources.

The “Flight operations at the airport continued normally and the airport was not affected by any damage,” the Irbil airport authority said in a statement.

The incident only caused a temporary delay in the landing of one aircraft, the statement added.


Jordanian and Vatican officials discuss promotion of Petra as destination for Christian pilgrims

Updated 03 July 2025
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Jordanian and Vatican officials discuss promotion of Petra as destination for Christian pilgrims

  • They say there is a strategic opportunity to integrate the UNESCO World Heritage Site into routes for Christian travelers
  • Head of tourism authority says highlighting Petra’s significance to Christian heritage itineraries could enhance Jordan’s position on global religious tourism map

LONDON: Officials from Jordan and the Vatican met on Thursday to discuss ways in which they can cooperate to advance religious tourism, including the promotion of the ancient city of Petra as a destination for Christian pilgrims.

Fares Braizat, who chairs the board of commissioners of the Petra Development and Tourism Regional Authority, said that highlighting the significance of the UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of Christian heritage itineraries could enhance Jordan’s position on the global religious tourism map.

The country has a number of important Christian sites, the most significant of which is the location on the eastern bank of the Jordan River where Jesus is said to have been baptized by John the Baptist. Several popes have visited it, including Francis and John Paul II.

Archbishop Giovanni Pietro Dal Toso, the Vatican’s ambassador to Jordan, confirmed the interest in collaborating with Jordanian authorities, and praised the nation’s stability and its rich historical and religious heritage.

Both officials acknowledged the strategic opportunity that exists to integrate Petra into pilgrimage routes for Christian travelers, the Jordan News Agency reported.

The Petra tourism authority recently lit up the Colosseum in Rome with the signature colors of the historic Jordanian site to celebrate a twinning agreement as part of a marketing strategy to attract European visitors, and to raise Petra’s profile globally as a premier cultural and spiritual tourism destination.

The Vatican itself is also a major tourism destination, for Christian pilgrims in particular. In 2025 it is expected to welcome between 30 and 35 million visitors during its latest Jubilee Year, a significant ecclesiastical event that takes place every 25 years.


Last lifelines in Gaza are being cut, UN chief warns

Updated 03 July 2025
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Last lifelines in Gaza are being cut, UN chief warns

  • Secretary-General Antonio Guterres again raises alarm over increasingly dire humanitarian crisis as restrictions on aid mount and civilians run out of safe places to shelter
  • He expresses grave concern over series of attacks in recent days that hit locations in which Palestinians were seeking shelter or trying to obtain food

NEW YORK CITY: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday said he was “appalled” by the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza, condemned recent deadly strikes against displaced people, and warned that the enclave is on the brink of total collapse as fuel supplies run out.

He expressed grave concern over a series of attacks in recent days that hit locations in which Palestinians sought shelter or were trying to access food.

Guterres’ spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, read a statement that said: “Multiple attacks (have) killed and injured scores of Palestinians. The secretary-general strongly condemns the loss of civilian life.”

Civilians in Gaza are running out of safe areas in which to shelter as Israeli evacuation orders continue to expand, Dujarric added as he warned of a dire humanitarian crisis amid mounting restrictions on the delivery of aid and rising casualties among relief workers.

Israeli authorities issued a new displacement order on Thursday targeting parts of Gaza City, citing as a reason rocket fire from Palestinian groups. It affected an estimated 40,000 people, including those living in a displacement site, a medical facility, and a neighborhood previously spared evacuation orders since a temporary ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas ended in March.

“As of earlier today, about 900 families are estimated to have fled,” Dujarric said, adding that approximately 78 percent of the Gaza Strip has now been affected by the cumulative effects of more than 50 such orders. When combined with the effects on areas designated as Israeli militarized zones, the figure rises to 85 percent, leaving just 15 percent of the territory available for civilians to live.

“Those areas are, of course, overcrowded,” Dujarric said. “They also severely lack basic services or proper infrastructure.”

He described the remaining habitable zones as fragmented and unsafe, and compared the humanitarian conditions there to having more than 2 million crammed into Manhattan but

“instead of buildings, the area is strewn with the rubble of demolished and burnt-out structures without any infrastructure or basic support.”

The UN Population Fund has reported that an estimated 700,000 women and girls in Gaza are experiencing “a nightmare” situation as a result of lack of access to menstrual hygiene products, water and privacy. It said it has nearly 170 truckloads of supplies ready for delivery but they remain blocked from entering Gaza.

Meanwhile, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that nine more aid workers from five organizations have died in Gaza since last Thursday, bringing the death toll among aid personnel to 107 in 2025, and 479 since the war began in October 2023; 326 members of UN staff are among the dead.

OCHA also highlighted the significant obstacles humanitarian operations faced in June. Out of nearly 400 attempts to coordinate with Israeli authorities, 44 percent were denied, and 10 percent were initially approved but later obstructed. Only a third of the missions were fully facilitated, while 12 percent were canceled due to logistical or security issues.

Four out of 16 humanitarian coordination efforts were denied on Thursday alone, Dujarric said, hindering efforts to relocate medical supplies and clear debris.

“The space left for civilians to stay is shrinking by the day,” he added.

In his statement, Guterres underscored the fact that international humanitarian law is “unambiguous” in its requirement for civilians to be protected and their basic needs met.

He warned that the continuing blockade on fuel deliveries, now entering an 18th week, threatens to bring remaining humanitarian operations to a halt.

“Without an urgent influx of fuel, incubators will shut down, ambulances will be unable to reach the injured and sick, and water cannot be purified,” he said, adding that the UN and its partners might soon be unable to deliver even the limited amount of aid that remains in Gaza.

Guterres repeated his call for “full, safe and sustained humanitarian access,” and said the UN has a ready, proven plan to deliver aid “safely and at scale” to civilians across the territory.

He also renewed his appeal for an “immediate, permanent ceasefire” and the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” and stressed that all parties involved in the conflict must uphold their obligations under international law.