Almost 400 Hezbollah members dead in 10 months of Israel clashes

Ten months of cross-border violence between Hezbollah and Israeli forces has killed senior commanders and several hundred fighters from the Iran-backed group, causing destruction and displacing tens of thousands on both sides. (AP)
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Updated 15 August 2024
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Almost 400 Hezbollah members dead in 10 months of Israel clashes

  • Hezbollah has seen more fighters killed since October than when it last went to war with Israel in the summer of 2006
  • Israel has repeatedly said it has killed other Hezbollah fighters whom it has called “commanders“

BEIRUT: Ten months of cross-border violence between Hezbollah and Israeli forces has killed senior commanders and several hundred fighters from the Iran-backed group, causing destruction and displacing tens of thousands on both sides.
Hezbollah has seen more fighters killed since October than when it last went to war with Israel in the summer of 2006.
AFP looks at the mounting toll for the Shiite Muslim movement, which has been trading near-daily fire with the Israeli army in support of Hamas since the Palestinian militant group’s October 7 attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war.
Israeli strikes have killed key Hezbollah commanders in recent months, the most senior of them top operations chief in south Lebanon Fuad Shukr, who died in a raid on Beirut’s southern suburbs on July 30. Hezbollah has vowed to respond to his killing.
In January, a commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, Wissam Tawil, was killed in an Israeli strike on his vehicle in south Lebanon.
Two out of its three area commanders in south Lebanon have also been killed — Mohammed Nasser and Taleb Abdallah.
Hezbollah divided its operations in south Lebanon into three areas following the 2006 war, each with its own “military formation, commander, personnel, weapons and capacities,” the group’s chief Hassan Nasrallah said last month.
He said south of the Litani river comprised two areas: a western sector, covered by Hezbollah’s Aziz unit, and an eastern sector running to the contested Shebaa Farms manned by the group’s Nasr unit, which opened Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks in October.
The third sector, north of the Litani river up to the coastal city of Sidon, is covered by the group’s Badr unit.
Aziz unit commander Nasser was killed in an Israeli strike last month, while Nasr unit commander Abdallah was killed in a raid the month before.
Israel has repeatedly said it has killed other Hezbollah fighters whom it has called “commanders.”
The violence has killed some 570 people in Lebanon, most of them fighters from Hezbollah but also including dozens from allied armed groups including Hamas, according to an AFP tally, with at least 118 civilians among the dead.
On the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, 22 soldiers and 26 civilians have been killed, according to military figures.
Hezbollah has issued statements announcing the deaths of more than 370 members who have been killed in Lebanon, according to the AFP tally.
The Lebanese group has mostly described them as “martyred on the road to Jerusalem,” the phrase it uses to refer to those killed in Israeli strikes.
Another 25 have been killed in neighboring Syria, where Israel has for years carried out strikes on army positions and pro-Iran fighters, also seeking to cut off Hezbollah supply lines to Lebanon from Tehran.
According to the statements, around 320 of the slain Hezbollah fighters were from south Lebanon, with some 60 from the eastern Bekaa Valley, which borders Syria.
Several south Lebanon villages close to the Israeli border each count around a dozen slain fighters, the statements have indicated.
Around 70 percent of the more than 230 fighters killed since late January, when Hezbollah began to provide the year of birth on its death statements, were aged 40 or under.
At least six were aged 20 or under, with three born the same year as the 2006 war or after it.
A source close to Hezbollah, requesting anonymity, told AFP that fewer than 300 fighters from the group were killed in the 2006 conflict.
Hezbollah has said it is seeking to tie up Israeli military resources in the country’s north in support of ally Hamas.
The escalating attacks have raised fears of a broader conflict, and Lebanon has been on edge since Shukr’s death.
Earlier this month, the heavily armed group said it had carried out 2,500 “military operations” against Israel since October.
It claimed to have targeted “border positions” 1,328 times and “military barracks” 391 times, using a variety of weapons including artillery, rockets, “guided missiles” and “air defense weapons.”
The group has also released three videos purportedly showing surveillance drone footage taken by the group across the border, widely viewed as a potential bank of targets in case of all-out war.
The footage includes aerial images of military positions in northern Israel and the annexed Golan Heights, as well as sensitive areas in and around the port city of Haifa.


Iraq’s water reserves lowest in 80 years: official

Updated 36 min 17 sec ago
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Iraq’s water reserves lowest in 80 years: official

  • Iraqi spokesperson of the Water Resources Ministry Khaled Shamal says the country hasn't seen such a low reserve in 80 years
  • Iraq is considered by the United Nations to be one of the five most impacted countries by climate change

BAGHDAD: Iraq’s water reserves are at their lowest in 80 years after a dry rainy season, a government official said Sunday, as its share from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers shrinks.
Water is a major issue in the country of 46 million people undergoing a serious environmental crisis because of climate change, drought, rising temperatures and declining rainfall.
Authorities also blame upstream dams built in neighboring Iran and Turkiye for dramatically lowering the flow of the once-mighty Tigris and Euphrates, which have irrigated Iraq for millennia.
“The summer season should begin with at least 18 billion cubic meters... yet we only have about 10 billion cubic meters,” water resources ministry spokesperson Khaled Shamal told AFP.
“Last year our strategic reserves were better. It was double what we have now,” Shamal said.
“We haven’t seen such a low reserve in 80 years,” he added, saying this was mostly due to the reduced flow from the two rivers.
Iraq currently receives less than 40 percent of its share from the Tigris and Euphrates, according to Shamal.
He said sparse rainfall this winter and low water levels from melting snow has worsened the situation in Iraq, considered by the United Nations to be one of the five countries most vulnerable to some impacts of climate change.
Water shortages have forced many farmers in Iraq to abandon the land, and authorities have drastically reduced farming activity to ensure sufficient supplies of drinking water.
Agricultural planning in Iraq always depends on water, and this year it aims to preserve “green spaces and productive areas” amounting to more than 1.5 million Iraqi dunams (375,000 hectares), said Shamal.
Last year, authorities allowed farmers to cultivate 2.5 million dunams of corn, rice, and orchards, according to the water ministry.
Water has been a source of tension between Iraq and Turkiye, which has urged Baghdad to adopt efficient water management plans.
In 2024, Iraq and Turkiye signed a 10-year “framework agreement,” mostly to invest in projects to ensure better water resources management.


Israeli strikes kill 23 in Gaza, including a journalist and rescue service official

Updated 25 May 2025
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Israeli strikes kill 23 in Gaza, including a journalist and rescue service official

  • Israeli fire kills at least 23 people in Gaza
  • Israel controls 77 percent of Gaza Strip, Hamas media office says

CAIRO: Israeli military strikes killed at least 23 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, including a local journalist and a senior rescue service official, local health authorities said.
The latest deaths in the Israeli campaign resulted from separate Israeli strikes in Khan Younis in the south, Jabalia in the north and Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip, medics said.
In Jabalia, they said local journalist Hassan Majdi Abu Warda and several family members were killed by an airstrike that hit his house earlier on Sunday.
Another airstrike in Nuseirat killed Ashraf Abu Nar, a senior official in the territory’s civil emergency service, and his wife in their house, medics added.
There was no immediate comment by the Israeli military.
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said that Abu Warda’s death raised the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 220.
In a separate statement, the media office said Israeli forces were in control of 77 percent of the Gaza Strip, either through ground forces or evacuation orders and bombardment that keeps residents away from their homes.
The armed wing of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said in separate statements on Sunday that fighters carried out several ambushes and attacks using bombs and anti-tank rockets against Israeli forces operating in several areas across Gaza.
On Friday the Israeli military said it had conducted more strikes in Gaza overnight, hitting 75 targets including weapons storage facilities and rocket launchers.
Israel launched an air and ground war in Gaza after Hamas militants’ cross-border attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people by Israeli tallies with 251 hostages abducted into Gaza.
The conflict has killed more than 53,900 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, and devastated the coastal strip. Aid groups say signs of severe malnutrition are widespread.


Israeli military says it intercepted missile from Yemen

Updated 25 May 2025
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Israeli military says it intercepted missile from Yemen

  • Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza

CAIRO: The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen toward Israel.
Sirens sounded in several areas in the country, the Israeli military said earlier.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Most of the group’s missile have been intercepted or have fallen short.
The Houthis did not immediately comment on the latest missile launch.


Syria to help locate missing Americans

Updated 25 May 2025
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Syria to help locate missing Americans

DAMASCUS: Syria’s new authorities have agreed to help the United States locate and return Americans who went missing in the war-torn country, a US envoy said on Sunday.
“The new Syrian government has agreed to assist the USA in locating and returning USA citizens or their remains. The families of Austin Tice, Majd Kamalmaz, and Kayla Mueller must have closure,” US special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack wrote on X.


Turkiye, PKK must both change for peace: former militant

Updated 25 May 2025
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Turkiye, PKK must both change for peace: former militant

  • For years, Yuksel Genc was a fighter with the Kurdish rebel group
  • Genc herself joined the militants in 1995 when she was a 20-year-old university student in Istanbul

DIYARBAKIR, Turkiye: “When you try and explain peace to people, there is a very serious lack of trust,” said Yuksel Genc, a former fighter with the PKK, which recently ended its decades-long armed struggle against the Turkish state.
Talking over a glass of tea in a square in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in Turkiye’s Kurdish-dominated southeast, this 50-year-old former fighter with long auburn curls is worried about how the nascent rapprochement between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) will play out.
“The guerillas are sincere, but they don’t think the state is,” said Genc, her words briefly interrupted by the roar of a fighter jet flying overhead.
“They think the government does not trust them.”
For years, she was a fighter with the Kurdish rebel group, which on May 12 said it would disarm and disband, ending a four-decade armed struggle against the Turkish state that cost more than 40,000 lives.
The historic move came in response to an appeal by its jailed founder Abdullah Ocalan, arrested in 1999 and serving life in solitary ever since on a prison island near Istanbul.
Genc herself joined the militants in 1995 when she was a 20-year-old university student in Istanbul.
“At that time, many Kurdish villages were being burnt down, and we were constantly hearing about villages being evacuated, people being displaced and unsolved murders,” she said.
She described it as “a time of terrible repression.”
“You felt trapped, as if there was no other way than to join the guerrillas,” she said.
Four years later, after years in exile, Ocalan was snatched by Turkish commandos in a Hollywood-style operation in Nairobi.
“Ocalan’s capture provoked a deep sense of rage among the guerrillas, who feared it would mean the Kurdish cause would be destroyed,” she said.
But it was Ocalan himself who called for calm and insisted it was time for the Kurdish question to be resolved democratically. He urged his followers to go to Turkiye, hand over their weapons and seek dialogue.
“He thought our arrival would symbolize (the PKK’s) goodwill, and persuade the state to negotiate.”
Genc was part of the first so-called “groups for peace and a democratic solution” — a group of three women and five men who arrived in Turkiye on October 1, 1999 on what they knew would be a “sacrificial” mission.
After a long march through the mountains, they arrived in the southeastern village of Semdinli under the watchful eye of “thousands” of Turkish soldiers huddled behind rocks.
Handing over their weapons, they were transferred to the city of Van 200 kilometers (140 miles) to the north where they were arrested.
Genc spent the next nearly six years behind bars.
“For us, these peace groups were a mission,” she said. “The solution had to come through dialogue.”
After getting out, she continued to struggle for Kurdish rights, swapping her gun for a pen to become a journalist and researcher for the Sosyo Politik think tank.
Even so, her writing earned her another three-and-a-half years behind bars.
“Working for peace in Turkiye has a cost,” she said with a shrug.
When Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister in 2003, there was hope for a new breakthrough. But several attempts to reach an agreement went nowhere — until now.
“Like in 1999, the PKK is moving toward a non-violent struggle,” she said.
“But laying down arms is not the end of the story. It is preparing to become a political organization.”
Resolving the decades-long conflict requires a change on both sides however, said Genc.
“It essentially involves a mutual transformation,” she argued.
“It is impossible for the state to stick with its old ways without transforming, while trying to resolve a problem as old and divisive as the Kurdish question.”
Despite the recent opening, Genc does not speak of hope.
“Life has taught us to be realistic: years of experience have generated an ocean of insecurity,” she said.
“(PKK fighters) have shown their courage by saying they will lay down their weapons without being defeated. But they haven’t seen any concrete results.”
So far, the government, which initiated the process last autumn, has not taken any steps nor made any promises, she pointed out.
“Why haven’t the sick prisoners been released? And those who have served their sentences — why aren’t they benefiting from the climate of peace?“
And Ocalan, she said, was still being held in solitary despite promises of a change in his situation.
The number of people jailed for being PKK members or close to the group has never been revealed by the Turkish authorities.
“The fact that Ocalan is still not in a position to be able to lead this process toward a democratic solution is a major drawback from the militants’ point of view,” she said.
“Even our daily life remains totally shaped by security constraints across the region with the presence of the army, the roadblocks — all that has to change.”