DOUMA, Syria: A few dozen protesters gathered in the Syrian city of Douma on Wednesday demanding answers about the fate of four prominent activists abducted more than a decade ago.
Holding up photographs of the missing activists, the demonstrators called on Syria’s new rulers — the Islamist-led rebels who seized power last month — to investigate what happened to them.
“We are here because we want to know the whole truth about two women and two men who were disappeared from this place 11 years and 22 days ago,” said activist Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh, whose wife Samira Khalil was among those abducted.
In December 2013, Khalil, Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada and Nazem Al-Hammadi were kidnapped by unidentified gunmen from the office of a human rights group they ran together in the then rebel-held city outside Damascus.
The four played an active role in the 2011 uprising against Bashar Assad’s rule and also documented violations, including by the Islamist rebel group Jaish Al-Islam that controlled the Douma area in the early stages of the ensuing civil war.
No group has claimed the four activists’ abduction and they have not been heard from since.
Many in Douma blame Jaish Al-Islam but the rebel group has denied involvement.
“We have enough evidence to incriminate Jaish Al-Islam, and we have the names of suspects we would like to see investigated,” Hajj Saleh said.
He said he wanted “the perpetrators to be tried by the Syrian courts.”
The fate of tens of thousands of people who disappeared under the Assads’ rule is a key question for Syria’s interim rulers after more than 13 years of devastating civil war that saw upwards of half a million people killed.
“We are here because we want the truth. The truth about their fate and justice for them, so that we may heal our wounds,” said Alaa Al-Merhi, 33, Khalil’s niece.
Khalil was a renowned activist hailing from the Assads’ Alawite minority who was jailed from 1987 to 1991 for opposing their iron-fisted rule.
Her husband is also a renowned human rights activist who was detained in 1980 and forced to live abroad for years.
“We as a family seek justice, to know their fate and to hold those resposible accountable for their actions,” she added.
Zeitouneh was among the 2011 winners of the European parliament’s human rights prize, A lawyer, she had received threats from both the government and the rebels before she went missing. Her husband Hamada was abducted with her.
Protesting was unthinkable just a month ago in Douma, a former rebel stronghold that paid a heavy price for rising up against the Assads.
Douma is located in Eastern Ghouta, an area controlled by rebel and jihadist factions for around six years until government forces retook it in 2018 after a long and bloody siege.
The siege of Eastern Ghouta culminated in a devastating offensive by the army that saw at least 1,700 civilians killed before a deal was struck that saw fighters and civilians evacuated to northern Syria.
Douma still bears the scars of the civil war, with many bombed out buildings.
During the conflict, all sides were accused of abducting and summarily executing opponents.
11 years on, Syria protesters demand answers on abducted activists
https://arab.news/gca2a
11 years on, Syria protesters demand answers on abducted activists
- No group has claimed the four activists’ abduction and they have not been heard from since
Hamas releases video of two Israeli hostages alive in Gaza
- Israeli media identified the pair in the undated video as Elkana Bohbot and Yosef Haim Ohana
- The three-minute video released by Hamas shows one of the hostages visibly weak
JERUSALEM: Hamas’s armed wing released a video on Saturday showing two Israeli hostages alive in the Gaza Strip, with one of the two men calling to end the 19-month-long war.
Israeli media identified the pair in the undated video as Elkana Bohbot and Yosef Haim Ohana, who were kidnapped during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war.
The three-minute video released by Hamas’s Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades shows one of the hostages, identified by media as 36-year-old Bohbot, visibly weak and lying on the floor wrapped in a blanket.
Bohbot, a Colombian-Israeli, was seen bound and injured in the face in video footage from the day of the Hamas attack. After a video of him was released last month, his family said they were “extremely concerned” about his health.
The second hostage, said to be Ohana, 24, speaks in Hebrew in the video, urging the Israeli government to end the war in Gaza and secure the release of all remaining captives — a similar message to statements made by other hostages, likely under duress, in previous videos released by Hamas.
Bohbot and Ohana, both abducted by Palestinian militants from the site of a music festival, are among 58 hostages held in Gaza since the 2023 attack, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Hamas also holds the remains of an Israeli soldier killed in a 2014 war.
Israel resumed its military offensive across the Gaza Strip on March 18, after a two-month truce that saw the release of dozens of hostages.
Since the ceasefire collapsed, Hamas has released several videos of hostages, including of the two appearing in Saturday’s video.
Israel says the renewed offensive aims to force Hamas to free the remaining captives, although critics charge that it puts them in mortal danger.
Hamas’s October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Saturday that at least 2,701 people have been killed since Israel resumed its campaign in Gaza, bringing the overall death toll since the war broke out to 52,810.
Qataris search for bodies of Americans killed by Daesh in Syria
- Search mission discussed in Qatari trip to US, source says
- Daesh beheaded a number of Western hostages
- Qatari mission begins before Trump visit to Doha
A Qatari mission has begun searching for the remains of US hostages killed by Daesh in Syria a decade ago, two sources briefed on the mission said, reviving a longstanding effort to recover their bodies.
Daesh, which controlled swathes of Syria and Iraq at the peak of its power from 2014-2017, beheaded numerous people in captivity, including Western hostages, and released videos of the killings.
Qatar’s international search and rescue group began the search on Wednesday, accompanied by several Americans, the sources said. The group, deployed by Doha to earthquake zones in Morocco and Turkiye in recent years, had so far found the remains of three bodies, the sources said.
One of the sources — a Syrian security source — said the remains had yet to be identified. The second source said it was unclear how long the mission would last.
The US State Department had no immediate comment.
The Qatari mission gets under way as US President Donald Trump prepares to visit Doha and other Gulf Arab allies next week and as Syria’s ruling Islamists, close allies of Qatar, seek relief from US sanctions.
The Syrian source said the mission’s initial focus was on looking for the body of aid worker Peter Kassig, who was beheaded by Daesh in 2014 in Dabiq in northern Syria. The second source said Kassig’s remains were among those they hoped to find.
US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were among other Western hostages killed by Daesh. Their deaths were confirmed in 2014.
US aid worker Kayla Mueller was also killed in Daesh captivity. She was raped repeatedly by Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi before her death, US officials have said. Her death was confirmed in 2015.
“We’re grateful for anyone taking on this task and risking their lives in some circumstances to try and find the bodies of Jim and the other hostages,” said Diane Foley, James Foley’s mother. “We thank all those involved in this effort.”
The families of the other hostages, contacted via the Committee to Protect Journalists, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The extremists were eventually driven out of their self-declared caliphate by a US-led coalition and other forces.
APRIL VISIT
Plans for the Qatari mission were discussed during a visit to Washington in April by Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and the Minister of State for the foreign ministry, Mohammed Al Khulaifi — a trip also designed to prepare for Trump’s visit to Qatar, one of the sources said.
Another person familiar with the issue said there had been a longstanding commitment by successive US administrations to find the remains of the murdered Americans, and that there had been multiple previous “efforts with US government officials on the ground in Syria to search very specific areas.”
The person did not elaborate. But the US has had hundreds of troops deployed in northeastern Syria that have continued pursuing the remnants of Daesh.
The person said the remains of Kassig, Sotloff and Foley were most likely in the same general area, and that Dabiq had been one of Daesh’s “centerpieces” — a reference to its propaganda value as a place named in an Islamic prophecy.
Mueller’s case differed in that she was in Baghdadi’s custody, the person said.
Two Daesh members, both former British citizens who were part of a cell that beheaded American hostages, are serving life prison sentences in the United States.
Syrian interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who seized power from Bashar Assad in December, battled Daesh when he was the commander of another jihadist faction — the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front — during the Syrian war.
Sharaa severed ties to Al-Qaeda in 2016.
33 killed in Sudan strikes blamed on paramilitary RSF
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.
UN’s top anti-racism body calls for immediate Gaza aid access
- Civilian population ‘at imminent risk of famine, disease and death,’ statement warns
- Israel has blocked humanitarian aid entering Gaza since March in bid to ‘pressurize Hamas’
NEW YORK CITY: The UN’s top anti-racism body has called for immediate humanitarian access to Gaza in a bid to avoid “catastrophic consequences” for its civilian population.
The statement by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — comprised of independent experts — came hours after the World Central Kitchen charity said it was forced to end operations in Gaza due to a lack of food.
It also follows a commitment by Israel to “conquer” almost all of the enclave, as well as disputes involving Israel, the UN and US over the appropriate way to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians there.
The CERD committee is convening in Geneva for its latest session, ending today.
Gaza’s civilian population, “especially vulnerable groups such as children, women, the elderly and persons with disabilities,” are “at imminent risk of famine, disease and death,” the committee said.
The warning follows an earlier appeal by the World Food Programme, the UN’s food agency, which said that almost all food aid operations in Gaza had collapsed.
Late last month, the agency announced that the entirety of its food reserves in the enclave had been depleted.
Since March, Israel has blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza in a bid to build pressure on Hamas, which still holds Israeli hostages.
Tom Fletcher, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, said last week: “Two months ago, the Israeli authorities took a deliberate decision to block all aid to Gaza and halt our efforts to save survivors of their military offensive.
“They have been bracingly honest that this policy is to pressurize Hamas.”
Expanded military operations by Israel in Gaza over the past two months “have dramatically worsened the humanitarian crisis and severely endangered the civilian population,” Friday’s CERD statement said.
The committee called on Israel to “lift all barriers to humanitarian access, allow the immediate and unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid, and cease all actions obstructing the provision of essential services to the civilian population in Gaza.”
The statement also highlighted worsening conditions across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including in East Jerusalem, where Israel closed six UNRWA schools this week.
Philippe Lazzarini, the Palestinian refugee agency’s chief, reacted with fury over the move, describing it as an “assault on children.”
The CERD statement called on all UN states to “cooperate to bring an end to the violations that are taking place and to prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, including by ceasing any military assistance.”
UN committee warns of ‘another Nakba’ in Palestinian territories
- During the 1948 war, around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what became known as “the Nakba”
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.”
