Women rally for equal rights in Syria after Assad’s fall to Islamists
Women rally for equal rights in Syria after Assad’s fall to Islamists/node/2584112/middle-east
Women rally for equal rights in Syria after Assad’s fall to Islamists
Women hold Women's Protection Units (YPJ) flags during a rally demanding the new Islamist rulers in Damascus respect women's rights and condemn Turkish-backed military campaigns in Kurdish-led regions of the north, in the northeastern city of Qamishli, Syria, December 23, 2024. (REUTERS)
Women rally for equal rights in Syria after Assad’s fall to Islamists
Hostilities between the SDF and a Turkiye-backed Syrian force known as the Syrian National Army have escalated since Assad was ousted, with the SDF driven out of the northern city of Manbij
Updated 23 December 2024
Reuters
QAMISHLI, Syria: Thousands of women rallied in the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli on Monday to demand the new Islamist rulers in Damascus respect women’s rights and to condemn Turkish-backed military campaigns in Kurdish-led regions of the north.
Many of the protesters waved the green flag of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), an affiliate of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units militia (YPG) that Turkiye deems a national security threat and wants disbanded immediately.
“We are demanding women’s rights from the new state ... and women must not be excluded from rights in this system,” said Sawsan Hussein, a women’s rights activist.
“We are (also) condemning the attacks of the Turkish occupation against the city of Kobani.”
Kurdish groups have enjoyed autonomy across much of the north since Syria’s civil war began in 2011. The Kurdish YPG militia, which leads the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) armed group, is a major force in the area.
But Syria’s power balance has shifted away from these groups since the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group (HTS) swept into Damascus and toppled Bashar Assad two weeks ago, establishing a new administration friendly to Ankara.
Syria’s dominant Kurdish groups embrace an ideology emphasising socialism and feminism — in contrast to the conservative Sunni Islamist views of HTS, a former Al-Qaeda affiliate.
Turkiye views the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984 and is deemed a terrorist group by Turkiye, the United States and the European Union.
Hostilities between the SDF and a Turkiye-backed Syrian force known as the Syrian National Army have escalated since Assad was ousted, with the SDF driven out of the northern city of Manbij.
Syrian Kurdish leaders have warned that Turkish forces are mobilizing for an offensive on the SDF-controlled city of Kobani at the Turkish border, also known as Ayn Al-Arab.
There is widespread apprehension among Syrians that the new Damascus administration will gravitate toward hard-line Islamist rule, marginalizing minorities and women from public life.
Obaida Arnout, a spokesperson for the Syrian transitional government, said last week that women’s “biological and physiological nature” rendered them unfit for certain governmental jobs.
Hemrin Ali, an official in the Kurdish-led administration of northeastern Syria, told Reuters at Monday’s rally: “Yes to supporting the YPJ. Yes to preserving the rights and gains of the women’s revolution in northern and eastern Syria.”
Israel defense minister says military will continue to strike Syrian forces until they withdraw
Katz also said the Syrian government should “leave Druze alone” following recent clashes in Sweida
Updated 6 sec ago
Reuters
Israel Defense Minister Israel Katz said that the military will continue to strike Syrian forces until they withdraw, warning that the level of response will escalate if the message is not understood, according to local media reports on Wednesday.
Katz also said the Syrian government should “leave Druze alone” following recent clashes in Syria’s Sweida city, Israeli media reported.
Iran seizes foreign tanker for smuggling 2 million liters of fuel
The judiciary official added that 17 crew members were arrested
Updated 16 July 2025
Reuters
DUBAI: A foreign tanker was seized by Iran in the Gulf of Oman for smuggling 2 million liters of fuel, the chief justice of Hormozgan province said on Wednesday, according to Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency.
“During the continuous process of monitoring and surveilling suspicious fuel smuggling movements in the Gulf of Oman, officers inspected a foreign tanker due to its lack of legal documents regarding its cargo and seized it on charges of carrying 2 million liters of smuggled fuel,” Hormozgan’s Chief Justice Mojtaba Ghahremani said, according to the report.
The judiciary official added that 17 crew members were arrested and that a judicial case was opened at the Jask county prosecutor’s office.
There was no additional information regarding the name of the tanker or the flag to which it is registered.
Iran, which has some of the world’s lowest fuel prices due to heavy subsidies and the plunge in the value of its national currency, has been fighting rampant fuel smuggling by land to neighboring countries and by sea to Gulf Arab states.
“The actions of fuel smugglers, who in coordination with foreigners, attempt to plunder national wealth will not remain hidden from the judiciary and punishment of perpetrators, if their crimes are proven, will be without leniency,” Ghahremani said, according to the report.
Syria announces ceasefire after sectarian clashes, but more fighting and abuse alleged
Tuesday’s announcement follows deadly sectarian clashes between Druze factions and Sunni Bedouin tribes that killed over 30 people
That’s according to Syria’s Interior Ministry. However, fighting and allegations of civilian abuses by security forces continue
Updated 16 July 2025
AP
BUSRA AL-HARIR: Syria ‘s defense minister announced a ceasefire shortly after government forces entered a key city in southern Sweida province on Tuesday, a day after sectarian clashes killed dozens there. Neighboring Israel again launched strikes on Syrian military forces, saying it was protecting the Druze minority.
The latest escalation under Syria’s new leaders began with tit-for-tat kidnappings and attacks between local Sunni Bedouin tribes and Druze armed factions in the southern province, a center of the Druze community.
Syrian government forces, sent to restore order on Monday, also clashed with Druze armed groups.
A ceasefire announcement
On Tuesday, Syrian Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra said an agreement was struck with the city’s “notables and dignitaries” and that government forces would “respond only to the sources of fire and deal with any targeting by outlaw groups.”
However, scattered clashes continued after his announcement — as did allegations that security forces had committed violations against civilians.
Syria’s Interior Ministry said Monday that more than 30 people had been killed, but has not updated the figures since. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, said Tuesday that 166 people had been killed since Sunday, including five women and two children.
Among them were 21 people killed in “field executions” by government forces, including 12 men in a rest house in the city of Sweida, it said. It did not say how many of the dead were civilians and also cited reports of members of the security forces looting and setting homes on fire.
Syrian interim President Ahmad Al-Sharaa said in a statement that he had tasked authorities with “taking immediate legal action against anyone proven to have committed a transgression or abuse, regardless of their rank or position.”
Associated Press journalists in Sweida province saw forces at a government checkpoint searching cars and confiscating suspected stolen goods from both civilians and soldiers.
Israel’s involvement draws pushback
Israeli airstrikes targeted government forces’ convoys heading into the provincial capital of Sweida and in other areas of southern Syria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strikes sought to “prevent the Syrian regime from harming” the Druze religious minority “and to ensure disarmament in the area adjacent to our borders with Syria.” In Israel, the Druze are seen as a loyal minority and often serve in the armed forces.
Meanwhile, Israeli Cabinet member and Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli called on X for Al-Sharaa to be “eliminated without delay.”
A soldier’s story
Manhal Yasser Al-Gor, of the Interior Ministry forces, was being treated for shrapnel wounds at a local hospital after an Israeli strike hit his convoy.
‘We were entering Sweida to secure the civilians and prevent looting. I was on an armored personnel carrier when the Israeli drone hit us,” he said, adding that there were “many casualties.”
The Syrian Foreign Ministry said Israeli strikes had killed “several innocent civilians” as well as soldiers, and called them “a reprehensible example of ongoing aggression and external interference” in Syria’s internal matters.
It said the Syrian state is committed to protecting the Druze, “who form an integral part of the national identity and united Syrian social fabric.”
Suspicion over Syria’s new government
Israel has taken an aggressive stance toward Syria’s new leaders since Al-Sharaa’s Sunni Islamist insurgents ousted former President Bashar Assad in December, saying it doesn’t want militants near its borders. Israeli forces have seized a UN-patrolled buffer zone on Syrian territory along the border with the Golan Heights and launched hundreds of airstrikes on military sites in Syria.
Earlier Tuesday, religious leaders of the Druze community in Syria called for armed factions that have been clashing with government forces to surrender their weapons and cooperate with authorities. One of the main Druze spiritual leaders later released a video statement retracting the call.
Sheikh Hikmat Al-Hijri, who has been opposed to the government in Damascus, said in the video that the initial Druze leaders’ statement had been issued after an agreement with the authorities in Damascus but that “they broke the promise and continued the indiscriminate shelling of unarmed civilians.”
“We are being subjected to a total war of annihilation,” he claimed, without offering evidence.
Some videos on social media showed armed fighters with Druze captives, beating them and, in some cases, forcibly shaving men’s moustaches.
Sectarian and revenge attacks
The Druze religious sect began as a 10th-century offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam. More than half the roughly 1 million Druze worldwide live in Syria. Most of the other Druze live in Lebanon and Israel, including in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981.
Since Assad’s fall, clashes have broken out several times between forces loyal to the new Syrian government and Druze fighters.
The latest fighting has raised fears of more sectarian violence. In March, an ambush on government forces by Assad loyalists in another part of Syria triggered days of sectarian and revenge attacks. Hundreds of civilians were killed, most of them members of Assad’s minority Alawite sect. A commission was formed to investigate the attacks but no findings have been made public.
The videos and reports of soldiers’ violations spurred outrage and protests by Druze communities in neighboring Lebanon, northern Israel and in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights, where the Israeli military said dozens of protesters had crossed the border into Syrian territory.
The violence drew international concern. The US envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, called the violence “worrisome on all sides” in a post on.
“We are attempting to come to a peaceful, inclusive outcome for Druze, Bedouin tribes, the Syrian government and Israeli forces,” he said.
UN says 875 Palestinians have been killed near Gaza aid sites
The United Nations has called the GHF aid model “inherently unsafe” and a violation of humanitarian impartiality standards
Updated 16 July 2025
Reuters
GENEVA: The UN rights office said on Tuesday it had recorded at least 875 killings within the past six weeks at aid points in Gaza run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and convoys run by other relief groups, including the United Nations.
The majority of those killed were in the vicinity of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, while the remaining 201 were killed on the routes of other aid convoys.
The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to get supplies into Gaza, largely bypassing a UN-led system that Israel alleges has let Hamas-led militants loot aid shipments intended for civilians. Hamas denies the allegation.
The GHF, which began distributing food packages in Gaza in late May after Israel lifted an 11-week aid blockade, previously told Reuters that such incidents have not occurred on its sites and accused the UN of misinformation, which it denies.
The GHF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest UN figures.
“The data we have is based on our own information gathering through various reliable sources, including medical human rights and humanitarian organizations,” Thameen Al-Kheetan, a spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva.
The United Nations has called the GHF aid model “inherently unsafe” and a violation of humanitarian impartiality standards.
The GHF said on Tuesday it had delivered more than 75 million meals to Gaza Palestinians since the end of May, and that other humanitarian groups had “nearly all of their aid looted” by Hamas or criminal gangs.
The Israeli army previously told Reuters in a statement that it was reviewing recent mass casualties and that it had sought to minimize friction between Palestinians and the Israel Defense Forces by installing fences and signs and opening additional routes.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has previously cited instances of violent pillaging of aid, and the UN World Food Programme said last week that most trucks carrying food assistance into Gaza had been intercepted by “hungry civilian communities.”
UN finds rising child malnutrition in Gaza, where officials say Israeli strikes kill 93 people
Strike in Gaza City’s Tel Al-Hawa district Monday evening kills 19 members of same family
Gaza’s Health Ministry says bodies of 93 people killed by Israeli strikes brought to hospitals over the past 24 hours
Updated 16 July 2025
AP
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: Malnutrition rates among children in the Gaza Strip have doubled since Israel sharply restricted the entry of food in March, the UN said Tuesday. New Israeli strikes killed more than 90 Palestinians, including dozens of women and children, according to health officials.
Hunger has been rising among Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinians since Israel broke a ceasefire in March to resume the war and banned all food and other supplies from entering Gaza, saying it aimed to pressure Hamas to release hostages. It slightly eased the blockade in late May, allowing in a trickle of aid.
Zainab Abu Haleeb, a five-month-old Palestinian girl diagnosed with malnutrition, according to medics, lies on a bed as she receives treatment at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip July 15, 2025. (REUTERS)
UNRWA, the main UN agency caring for Palestinians in Gaza, said it had screened nearly 16,000 children under age 5 at its clinics in June and found 10.2 percent of them were acutely malnourished. By comparison, in March, 5.5 percent of the nearly 15,000 children it screened were malnourished.
New airstrikes kill several families
One strike in the northern Shati refugee camp killed a 68-year-old Hamas member of the Palestinian legislature, as well as a man and a woman and their six children who were sheltering in the same building, according to officials from the heavily damaged Shifa Hospital, where the casualties were taken.
One of the deadliest strikes hit a house in Gaza City’s Tel Al-Hawa district on Monday evening and killed 19 members of the family living inside, according to Shifa Hospital. The dead included eight women and six children. A strike on a tent housing displaced people in the same district killed a man and a woman and their two children.
The Israeli military did not comment on the strikes.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said in a daily report Tuesday afternoon that the bodies of 93 people killed by Israeli strikes had been brought to hospitals in Gaza over the past 24 hours, along with 278 wounded. It did not specify the total number of women and children among the dead.
The Hamas politician killed in a strike early Tuesday, Mohammed Faraj Al-Ghoul, was a member of the bloc of representatives from the group that won seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council in the last national elections, held in 2006.
The Israeli military says it only targets militants and tries to avoid harming civilians. It blames civilian deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in densely populated areas. But daily, it hits homes and shelters where people are living without warning or explanation of the target.
Malnutrition grows
UNICEF, which screens children separately from UNRWA, also reported a marked increase in malnutrition cases. It said this week its clinics had documented 5,870 cases of malnutrition among children in June, the fourth straight month of increases and more than double the around 2,000 cases it documented in February.
Experts have warned of famine since Israel tightened its lengthy blockade in March.
Israel has allowed an average of 69 trucks a day carrying supplies, including food, since it eased the blockade in May, according to the latest figures from COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of coordinating aid. That is far below the hundreds of trucks a day the UN says are needed to sustain Gaza’s population.
On Tuesday, COGAT blamed the UN for failing to distribute aid, saying in a post on X that thousands of pallets of supplies were inside Gaza waiting to be picked up by UN trucks. The UN says it has struggled to pick up and distribute aid because of Israeli military restrictions on its movements and the breakdown in law and order.
Israel has also let in food for distribution by an American contractor, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. GHF says it has distributed food boxes with the equivalent of more than 70 million meals since late May at the four centers it runs in the Rafah area of southern Gaza and in central Gaza.
More than 840 Palestinians have been killed and more than 5,600 others wounded in shootings as they walk for hours trying to reach the GHF centers, according to the Health Ministry. Witnesses say Israeli forces open fire with barrages of live ammunition to control crowds on the roads to the GHF centers, which are located in military-controlled zones.
The military says it has fired warning shots at people it says have approached its forces in a suspicious manner. GHF says no shootings have taken place in or immediately around its distribution sites.
No breakthrough in ceasefire efforts
The latest attacks came after US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held two days of talks last week that ended with no breakthrough in negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage release.
Israel has killed more than 58,400 Palestinians and wounded more than 139,000 others in its retaliation campaign since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Just over half the dead are women and children, according to the ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its tally.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas after its attack 21 month ago, in which militants stormed into southern Israel and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians. They abducted 251 others, and the militants are still holding 50 hostages, less than half of them believed to be alive.
US calls for probe into killing of Palestinian-American
In a separate development, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee called on Israel to investigate the killing of a 20-year-old Palestinian-American whose family said was beaten to death by Jewish settlers over the weekend in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“There must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act,” Huckabee wrote on X.
Seifeddin Musalat, born in Florida, and a local friend were killed Friday. Musalat was beaten to death by Israeli settlers on his family’s land, his cousin Diana Halum told reporters. The family had called on the US State Department to investigate his death and hold the settlers accountable.
The Israeli military said a confrontation erupted after Palestinians hurled stones at Israelis in the area earlier in the day, lightly wounding two people.
Huckabee, like many in the Trump administration, is a strong supporter of Israeli settlements, which are considered illegal by most of the international community and seen by the Palestinians as a major obstacle to peace.
Israel strikes Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley
Also on Tuesday, Israel launched a series of strikes in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, targeting what the military said were compounds of the Hezbollah militant group.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said that one of the strikes hit a Syrian refugee camp, killing seven Syrians. Altogether, the strikes killed 12 people and wounded eight, it said. Hezbollah said one of the strikes hit a rig used to drill water wells.
Israel has continued to carry out near-daily strikes in Lebanon since a US-brokered ceasefire agreement nominally brought an end to the latest Israel-Hezbollah war in November. Some 4,000 people were killed in Lebanon during the war and more than 250 since the ceasefire.
