Neighbors improvise first aid for wounded in besieged Sudan city

Neighbors improvise first aid for wounded in besieged Sudan city
Sudan's civil war has resulted in "13 million displaced people and refugees", including many women who reported being raped and children, a regional UNHCR official told AFP on April 14, 2025.(AFP)
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Updated 21 April 2025
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Neighbors improvise first aid for wounded in besieged Sudan city

Neighbors improvise first aid for wounded in besieged Sudan city
  • the Saudi Hospital is the only partially functioning one now, according to a medical source there, and even that has come under repeated attack.

PORT SUDAN: For a week, eight-year-old Mohamed has suffered the pain of shrapnel stuck in his arm. But he is one of the lucky ones in Sudan’s western city El-Fasher, which is under paramilitary attack.
“One of our neighbors used to be a nurse. She helped us stop the bleeding,” Mohamed’s father, Issa Said, 27, told AFP via satellite connection under a total communications blackout.
“But his arm is swollen and he can’t sleep at night from the pain.”
Like an estimated one million more people trapped in the city under a year-long siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Said cannot get to a hospital for emergency care.
With only the most meagre supplies remaining in El-Fasher, his family is among those whose only medical help has come from neighbors and family members who improvise.
In its quest to seize the North Darfur state capital — the only major Darfur city it has not conquered during two years of war with Sudan’s army — the RSF has launched attack after attack, which have been repelled by army and allied forces.
Even if people were to brave the streets, the Saudi Hospital is the only partially functioning one now, according to a medical source there, and even that has come under repeated attack.
Humanitarian operations in El-Fasher have been severely disrupted due to “access constraints, a critical fuel shortage and a volatile security environment,” with health services particularly affected, the United Nations’ humanitarian agency OCHA said.
’Opened their homes’
Mohamed, an aid coordinator who fled to El-Fasher after getting shot in the thigh during an RSF attack days ago on the nearby famine-hit Zamzam displacement camp, estimates hundreds of injured civilians are trapped in the city.
According to aid sources, hundreds of thousands have fled Zamzam for the city, which is already on the brink of mass starvation according to a UN-backed assessment.
Yet the people of El-Fasher have “opened their homes to the wounded,” Mohamed told AFP, requesting to be identified by his first name for safety.
“If you have the money, you send someone to buy clean gauze or painkillers if they can find any, but you have to make do with what you have,” said Mohamed, whose leg wound meant he had to be carried the 15 kilometers (nine miles) from Zamzam to the city, a journey that took hours.
In crowded living rooms and kitchens, civilians with barely any medical training cobble together emergency first aid, using household items and local medicinal plants to treat burns, gunshot wounds and shrapnel injuries.
Another victim, Mohamed Abakar, 29, said he was fetching water for his family when a bullet pierced his leg.
The limb immediately broke underneath him, and a neighbor dragged him into his home, fashioning him a splint out of a few pieces of wood and cloth.
“Even if it heals my broken leg, the bullet is still inside,” Abakar told AFP, also by satellite link.
Table salt as disinfectant
By Monday, the RSF’s recent attacks on El-Fasher and surrounding displacement camps had killed more than 400 people, according to the UN.
At least 825,000 children are trapped in “hell on Earth” in the city and its environs, the UN children’s agency UNICEF has warned.
The people of El-Fasher have suffered a year of RSF siege in a city the Sudanese military has also bombed from the air.
Residents have taken to hiding from the shelling in makeshift bunkers, which are often just hastily dug holes topped with bags of sand.
But not everyone makes it in time.
On Wednesday, a shell broke through Hanaa Hamad’s home, shrapnel tearing apart her husband’s abdomen before they could scramble to safety.
“A neighbor and I treated him as best we could. We disinfected the wound with table salt and we managed to stop the bleeding,” the 34-year-old mother of four told AFP.
But by morning, he had succumbed to his injuries, too severe for his wife and neighbor to handle.
Trying to recover from his leg wound, the aid coordinator Mohamed pleaded from his sick bed for “urgent intervention from anyone who can to save people.”
The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Friday called for aid airdrops.
“If the roads to El-Fasher are blocked, then air operations must be launched to bring food and medicines to the estimated one million people trapped there and being starved,” head of mission Rasmane Kabore said.


Egypt denies court ruling threatens historic monastery

Egypt denies court ruling threatens historic monastery
Updated 58 min 32 sec ago
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Egypt denies court ruling threatens historic monastery

Egypt denies court ruling threatens historic monastery
  • A court in Sinai ruled on that the monastery ‘is entitled to use’ the land, which ‘the state owns as public property’
  • Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens called the court ruling ‘scandalous’

CAIRO: Egypt has denied that a controversial court ruling over Sinai’s Saint Catherine monastery threatens the UNESCO world heritage landmark, after Greek and church authorities warned of the sacred site’s status.

A court in Sinai ruled on Wednesday in a land dispute between the monastery and the South Sinai governorate that the monastery “is entitled to use” the land, which “the state owns as public property.”

President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s office defended the ruling Thursday, saying it “consolidates” the site’s “unique and sacred religious status,” after the head of the Greek Orthodox church in Greece denounced it.

Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens called the court ruling “scandalous” and an infringement by Egyptian judicial authorities of religious freedoms.

He said the decision means “the oldest Orthodox Christian monument in the world, the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine in Mount Sinai, now enters a period of severe trial — one that evokes much darker times in history.”

El-Sisi’s office in a statement said it “reiterates its full commitment to preserving the unique and sacred religious status of Saint Catherine’s monastery and preventing its violation.”

The monastery was established in the sixth century at the biblical site of the burning bush in the southern mountains of the Sinai peninsula, and is the world’s oldest continually inhabited Christian monastery.

The Saint Catherine area, which includes the eponymous town and a nature reserve, is undergoing mass development under a controversial government megaproject aimed at bringing in mass tourism.

Observers say the project has harmed the reserve’s ecosystem and threatened both the monastery and the local community.

Archbishop Ieronymos warned that the monastery’s property would now be “seized and confiscated,” despite “recent pledges to the contrary by the Egyptian President to the Greek Prime Minister.”

Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis contacted his Egyptian counterpart Badr Abdelatty on Thursday, saying “there was no room for deviation from the agreements between the two parties,” the ministry’s spokesperson said.

In a statement to Egypt’s state news agency, the foreign ministry in Cairo later said rumors of confiscation were “unfounded,” and that the ruling “does not infringe at all” on the monastery’s sites or its religious and spiritual significance.

Greek government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said “Greece will express its official position ... when the official and complete content of the court decision is known and evaluated.”

He confirmed both countries’ commitment to “maintaining the Greek Orthodox religious character of the monastery.”


Israel aid blockage making Gaza ‘hungriest region on earth’, UN office says

Israel aid blockage making Gaza ‘hungriest region on earth’, UN office says
Updated 59 min 53 sec ago
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Israel aid blockage making Gaza ‘hungriest region on earth’, UN office says

Israel aid blockage making Gaza ‘hungriest region on earth’, UN office says

BERLIN: Israel is blocking all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, with almost no ready-to-eat food entering what its spokesperson described as “the hungriest place on earth.”
Spokesperson Jens Laerke said only 600 of 900 aid trucks had been authorized to get to Israel’s border with Gaza, and from there a mixture of bureaucratic and security obstacles made it all but impossible to safely carry aid into the region.
“What we have been able to bring in is flour,” he told a regular news conference on Friday. “That’s not ready to eat, right? It needs to be cooked... 100 percent of the population of Gaza is at risk of famine.”
Tommaso della Longa, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, added that half of its medical facilities in the region were out of action for lack of fuel or medical equipment.


Hamas receives Israeli response to US Gaza proposal and is reviewing it

Hamas receives Israeli response to US Gaza proposal and is reviewing it
Updated 30 May 2025
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Hamas receives Israeli response to US Gaza proposal and is reviewing it

Hamas receives Israeli response to US Gaza proposal and is reviewing it
  • Hamas: Israeli response fails to meet any of the Palestinian “just and legitimate demands”

DUBAI: Hamas has received Israel’s response to a US proposal for a Gaza ceasefire deal and is thoroughly reviewing it, even though the response fails to meet any of the Palestinian “just and legitimate demands,” group’s official Basem Naim said on Friday.


Daesh claims first attack on Syrian government forces since Assad’s fall

Daesh claims first attack on Syrian government forces since Assad’s fall
Updated 30 May 2025
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Daesh claims first attack on Syrian government forces since Assad’s fall

Daesh claims first attack on Syrian government forces since Assad’s fall
  • Daesh, which once controlled large parts of Syria and Iraq, is opposed to the new authority in Damascus led by President Ahmad Al-Sharaa
  • Daesh was defeated in Syria in March 2019 when SDF fighters captured the last sliver of land that the extremists controlled

BEIRUT: The Daesh group has claimed responsibility for two attacks in southern Syria, including one on government forces that an opposition war monitor described as the first on the Syrian army to be adopted by the extremists since the fall of Bashar Assad.

In two separate statements issued late Thursday, Daesh said that in the first attack, a bomb was detonated targeting a “vehicle of the apostate regime,” leaving seven soldiers dead or wounded. It said the attack occurred “last Thursday,” or May 22, in the Al-Safa area in the desert of the southern province of Sweida.

Daesh said that the second attack occurred this week in a nearby area during which a bomb targeted members of the US-backed Free Syrian Army, claiming that it killed one fighter and wounded three.

There was no comment from the government on the claim of the attack and a spokesperson for the Free Syrian Army didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the attack on government forces killed one civilian and wounded three soldiers, describing it as the first such attack to be claimed by Daesh against Syrian forces since the fall of the 54-year Assad family’s rule in December.

Daesh, which once controlled large parts of Syria and Iraq, is opposed to the new authority in Damascus led by President Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who was once the head of Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria and fought battles against Daesh.

Over the past several months, Daesh has claimed responsibility for attacks against the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast.

Daesh was defeated in Syria in March 2019 when SDF fighters captured the last sliver of land that the extremists controlled. Since then, its sleeper cells have carried out deadly attacks, mainly in eastern and northeast Syria.

In January, state media reported that intelligence officials in Syria’s post-Assad government thwarted a plan by Daesh to set off a bomb at a Shiite Muslim shrine south of Damascus.

Al-Sharaa met with US President Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia earlier this month during which the American leader said that Washington would work on lifting crippling economic sanctions imposed on Damascus since the days of Assad.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement after the meeting that Trump urged Al-Sharaa to diplomatically recognize Israel, “tell all foreign terrorists to leave Syria” and help the US stop any resurgence of the Daesh group.


Israel far-right minister says ‘time to go in with full force’ in Gaza

Israel far-right minister says ‘time to go in with full force’ in Gaza
Updated 30 May 2025
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Israel far-right minister says ‘time to go in with full force’ in Gaza

Israel far-right minister says ‘time to go in with full force’ in Gaza
  • Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said Friday it was time to use “full force” in Gaza, after Hamas said a new US-backed truce proposal failed to meet its demands

JERUSALEM: Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said Friday it was time to use “full force” in Gaza, after Hamas said a new US-backed truce proposal failed to meet its demands.
“Mr Prime Minister, after Hamas rejected the deal proposal again — there are no more excuses,” Ben Gvir said on his Telegram channel. “The confusion, the shuffling and the weakness must end. We have already missed too many opportunities. It is time to go in with full force, without blinking, to destroy, and kill Hamas to the last one.”