BBC
India train fire: Gas canister sets off deadly explosion
Sat, August 26, 2023 at 10:47 AM CDT
Carriage parked at Madurai railway station after a fire broke out, 26 August.
Some passengers illegally used a gas stove, officials say
A fire on a train carriage has killed nine people in India, after a gas canister used by passengers to make drinks exploded, officials say.
Nine others were injured in the fire, which occurred in the southern city of Madurai in Tamil Nadu state.
The carriage was carrying more than 50 pilgrims from Uttar Pradesh and was parked at the station when the cylinder blew up early on Saturday.
Survivors had to break doors to flee the burning carriage, eyewitnesses say.
The coach involved in Saturday's incident had arrived from Uttar Pradesh earlier in the day.
It was due to remain parked at Madurai station for two days, local media say.
The gas cylinder was illegally taken inside the carriage, officials are quoted as saying.
India suffered one of its worst-ever rail disasters in June when a collision killed 275 people in Odisha state.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/in ... 16747.html
Some comments:
Similarly A cylinder also burst in Godhra train while the hindu men had locked the train doors to prevent naked hindus sadhus wearing no clothes entering the train where hindu women were cooking and sleeping with children. Initaial enquiries pointed out to this. then the Hindutva gangs created a rumour and muslims were massacred with Modi and hindu police playing a criminal role in Gujarat killings for which Western govts, USA banned Modi for more than ten years. Modi also exposed by BBC.
Tamashai
It’s reminds the godhra incident which was capitalized to win the election. The burning appears exactly same as 30 years ago.
shahid
One of the possibilities of the fire in Godra.
MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Dire Warnings About Libya Dams Went Unheeded
“The state wasn’t interested,” said an engineer who published a paper on why Derna’s dams, after decades of postponed repairs, might fail under the stress of a powerful storm.
Derna, Libya, has been devastated by flooding from storms this week, which washed swaths of the city into the sea.Credit...Muhammad J. Elalwany/Associated Press
It had been clear for years that the dams protecting Derna, on Libya’s Mediterranean coast, were in danger of giving way.
Torrential rains were not new. Decade after decade, they had pounded the area, washing away the soil that helped soak up water as it ran down from the dry hills above town.
Climate change had also changed the land, making it drier, harder and increasingly shorn of vegetation, less able to absorb the water before it pooled up dangerously behind the dams.
Then, there were the decades of neglect by officials — who knew the dams needed repairs — in a country so torn by years of civil war that it still has two opposing governments: one in the west and another in the east, where Derna lies.
Academics had warned that it would not require a storm of biblical proportions to overwhelm the dams.
The residents of Derna are “extremely vulnerable to flood risk,” wrote Abdelwanees Ashoor, a hydraulic engineer at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Libya, in a paper he published in 2022.
The kind of storms that had hit the area in recent decades — he cited a damaging flood in 1959 — could bring down the dams and inundate Derna, he warned, calling the situation “dangerous.”
This past week, those predictions grimly proved to be true, when enormous flooding from a powerful storm broke through both dams and swept parts of the city into the sea. Thousands are dead and many more missing, according to the authorities. According to the International Organization for Migration, over 34,000 people were displaced by the catastrophe.
Reached by phone, Dr. Ashoor said he had lost several members of his extended family to the flooding this past week, adding that the government had ignored years of warnings — including his own paper.
“We’re living in shock. We can’t absorb what’s happening to us,” Dr. Ashoor said. “The state wasn’t interested in this. Instead, they guzzled money, practiced corruption and fought political squabbles.”
The dams had been built by engineers who had underestimated the amount of rain expected in the region, he argued. Making matters worse, the terrain had undergone a process of desertification, making it less porous and capable of absorbing runoff. Beyond that, local officials say the dams had barely been maintained since their construction in the late 1970s.
Dr. Ashoor said he had sent his paper to academic colleagues in the nation’s capital, Tripoli, and a senior dam expert in the United States said his conclusions appeared to be solid.
ImageA wide-angle view of a flooded, muddy area with piles of debris visible.
Floodwaters overwhelmed Derna on Monday, killing thousands of people.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“He nailed it,” said Michael W. West, a retired principal at the engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner. “His main point is that the hydrologic design of those dams was inadequate, and they couldn’t handle the large-magnitude storms.”
“It’s probably devastating to know you were right, plus the personal tragedy on top of that,” Mr. West added. “I can’t imagine how he’s feeling.”
Libya, an oil-rich nation on the shores of the Mediterranean, has been worn down by years of civil war and government misrule. Climate change only added to the strain, helping to turn the once-fertile terrain arid and desolate.
The two dams that towered over the city had been built with the help of engineers from the former Yugoslavia, according to experts. The larger one, known as Abu Mansour, stood 74 meters high and could hold up to 22.5 million cubic meters of water. The smaller one, al-Bilad, or simply Derna dam, was built on the city’s outskirts.
During the long, autocratic reign of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, floods came and went, but the dams stood. In 1986, a major storm convulsed the region, damaging the dams and shearing soil from the ground. The structures were damaged, Dr. Ashoor said, but again they held.
Despite the stresses, repairs were minimal. In 1998, the Libyan government commissioned a study that revealed cracks and fissures in the dams, said Attorney General Sadiq al-Soor.
Image
A city street damaged by flood, with crushed vehicles and piles of debris. A boy drags a large, mud-stained suitcase.
Thousands of people are estimated to be missing from Derna.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Nearly 10 years later, a Turkish company was finally contracted to repair the dams, the prosecutor added. But the government dragged its feet in paying, and the project got underway only in 2010, Mr. al-Soor told reporters on Friday.
Just four months later, in 2011, Libyans marched against Colonel el-Qaddafi’s 42-year grip on power, inspired by the uprisings that had toppled Arab autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt. When he threatened to annihilate the opposition, NATO intervened and bombed his forces, with the United States a backbone of the operation. Colonel el-Qaddafi was ousted from Tripoli that August.
In the tumult, work on the dam ceased, the prosecutor said.
He pledged that the authorities would take “firm measures” against anyone deemed responsible for failing to properly maintain the two dams. “This is extremely important for protecting the rights of the victims and to determine who was responsible — if there was neglect or dereliction of duty,” said Mr. al-Soor.
He said that the authorities had appointed prosecutors from different parts of Libya to investigate what caused the dams to collapse, inspect houses and determine whether maintenance measures could have prevented the disaster.
More than a decade after Colonel el-Qaddafi’s chaotic ouster, the country remains split between an internationally recognized government in the west and one under Khalifa Hifter, a military commander who controls the east, including Derna.
Derna was a key battleground during the country’s civil war, which saw the city fall under the control of Islamist militias. After a protracted siege, forces loyal to Mr. Hifter declared victory in 2018, although skirmishes continued for several months.
All the while, the neglect of the dams continued.
According to a 2021 report by Libyan state auditors in the west of the country, more than $2.3 million allocated for maintaining the two dams was simply never used. They called it a case of government negligence.
And as recently as last week, less than two days before the dam burst, a Libyan nonprofit, Roya, wrote on Facebook that the dam could fill to bursting during the powerful storm that was sweeping across the Mediterranean.
“We ask the residents of the valley to be very careful,” the group said.
Image
A wide-angle view of a flood-damaged area. There are piles of rubble and a six-story building with one section gouged away.
Residents of Derna said they were issued confusing, sometimes contradictory, orders on whether to evacuate. Many ended up trapped in their apartment buildings as the waters rushed through.Credit...Abdullah Doma/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Even as the waters swelled, some officials, far away in Tripoli, said just after midnight on Monday that the dams were in “good condition” and that there was “no cause for concern about collapse.” They added, however, that the storm had affected their ability to contact those charged with monitoring one of the dams.
Very soon after, well before dawn, the rising waters appear to have overwhelmed the dams — first the larger Abu Mansour dam, then the second, smaller one downstream, which was obliterated in a matter of “moments,” Dr. Ashoor said.
The rampaging tide wiped out large chunks of the city, shattering roads and bridges, washing away cars, and smashing apartment buildings, witnesses said
Whole families were killed, officials say, drowned or trapped under rubble. Others were dragged out to sea.
William F. Marcuson III, a former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that these dams — which were made with clay and rock — were common around the world.
“There’s nothing wrong with that approach, if it is done correctly,” he said. But, he added, the dams must be designed for the maximum rainstorms likely, and be constructed under careful inspection, so that no corners are cut.
The dams included concrete spillways that are supposed to function much like an overflow drain in an ordinary bathtub: If the water rises too high, it goes into the spillway, down underground pipes, and is discharged below the dam.
Scenes From a Deluge: Floods Devastate Libya
Powerful rains destroyed two dams, and the death toll is estimated at more than 5,000.
Sept. 12, 2023
But if the spillway is not built to a sufficient size or the pipes are too narrow for the strength of the storm, the water continues to rise.
When it rises over the top of the dam — called “overtopping” — the dam itself begins to erode. As that happens, the embankment, which supports the dam, is gradually eaten away until the entire structure fails and the water flows freely.
If the upstream dam failed first, a wall of water may have wiped out the lower dam frighteningly quickly.
With no more obstacles in its path, the water tore through the countryside, fanning out over dozens of kilometers. The main force of the raging torrent slid into the natural funnel of the Derna river basin, where residents say they were issued confusing, sometimes contradictory, orders on whether to evacuate.
Source: Videos and imagery of the floods, Google Maps imagery from August 2022
In a televised speech on Thursday, Aguila Saleh, the speaker of the Parliament in the nation’s east, sought to bat away accusations that the scale of the devastation was rooted in government mismanagement and neglect.
“Don’t say, ‘If only we’d done this, if only we’d done that,’” Mr. Saleh said. “What took place in our country was an incomparable natural disaster.”
Dr. Ashoor acknowledged that the flood was prompted by a giant storm rarely seen in the country. But he believes the authorities could have done far more to minimize the risk.
“Political strife, two governments, all of the wars we’ve seen since 2011, terrorism, all the problems we’ve faced,” Dr. Ashoor said. “All of this gathered together to lead to this deteriorating disaster, this calamity we’re living through. May God ease this crisis.”
Image
A bulldozer works at the edge of a large field, where a pit in the reddish-brown dirt holds rows of white body bags.
In Derna, hundreds were hastily buried in mass graves outside the city, health officials said.Credit...Ayman Al-Sahili/Reuters
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Derna, Libya, has been devastated by flooding from storms this week, which washed swaths of the city into the sea.Credit...Muhammad J. Elalwany/Associated Press
It had been clear for years that the dams protecting Derna, on Libya’s Mediterranean coast, were in danger of giving way.
Torrential rains were not new. Decade after decade, they had pounded the area, washing away the soil that helped soak up water as it ran down from the dry hills above town.
Climate change had also changed the land, making it drier, harder and increasingly shorn of vegetation, less able to absorb the water before it pooled up dangerously behind the dams.
Then, there were the decades of neglect by officials — who knew the dams needed repairs — in a country so torn by years of civil war that it still has two opposing governments: one in the west and another in the east, where Derna lies.
Academics had warned that it would not require a storm of biblical proportions to overwhelm the dams.
The residents of Derna are “extremely vulnerable to flood risk,” wrote Abdelwanees Ashoor, a hydraulic engineer at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Libya, in a paper he published in 2022.
The kind of storms that had hit the area in recent decades — he cited a damaging flood in 1959 — could bring down the dams and inundate Derna, he warned, calling the situation “dangerous.”
This past week, those predictions grimly proved to be true, when enormous flooding from a powerful storm broke through both dams and swept parts of the city into the sea. Thousands are dead and many more missing, according to the authorities. According to the International Organization for Migration, over 34,000 people were displaced by the catastrophe.
Reached by phone, Dr. Ashoor said he had lost several members of his extended family to the flooding this past week, adding that the government had ignored years of warnings — including his own paper.
“We’re living in shock. We can’t absorb what’s happening to us,” Dr. Ashoor said. “The state wasn’t interested in this. Instead, they guzzled money, practiced corruption and fought political squabbles.”
The dams had been built by engineers who had underestimated the amount of rain expected in the region, he argued. Making matters worse, the terrain had undergone a process of desertification, making it less porous and capable of absorbing runoff. Beyond that, local officials say the dams had barely been maintained since their construction in the late 1970s.
Dr. Ashoor said he had sent his paper to academic colleagues in the nation’s capital, Tripoli, and a senior dam expert in the United States said his conclusions appeared to be solid.
ImageA wide-angle view of a flooded, muddy area with piles of debris visible.
Floodwaters overwhelmed Derna on Monday, killing thousands of people.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“He nailed it,” said Michael W. West, a retired principal at the engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner. “His main point is that the hydrologic design of those dams was inadequate, and they couldn’t handle the large-magnitude storms.”
“It’s probably devastating to know you were right, plus the personal tragedy on top of that,” Mr. West added. “I can’t imagine how he’s feeling.”
Libya, an oil-rich nation on the shores of the Mediterranean, has been worn down by years of civil war and government misrule. Climate change only added to the strain, helping to turn the once-fertile terrain arid and desolate.
The two dams that towered over the city had been built with the help of engineers from the former Yugoslavia, according to experts. The larger one, known as Abu Mansour, stood 74 meters high and could hold up to 22.5 million cubic meters of water. The smaller one, al-Bilad, or simply Derna dam, was built on the city’s outskirts.
During the long, autocratic reign of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, floods came and went, but the dams stood. In 1986, a major storm convulsed the region, damaging the dams and shearing soil from the ground. The structures were damaged, Dr. Ashoor said, but again they held.
Despite the stresses, repairs were minimal. In 1998, the Libyan government commissioned a study that revealed cracks and fissures in the dams, said Attorney General Sadiq al-Soor.
Image
A city street damaged by flood, with crushed vehicles and piles of debris. A boy drags a large, mud-stained suitcase.
Thousands of people are estimated to be missing from Derna.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Nearly 10 years later, a Turkish company was finally contracted to repair the dams, the prosecutor added. But the government dragged its feet in paying, and the project got underway only in 2010, Mr. al-Soor told reporters on Friday.
Just four months later, in 2011, Libyans marched against Colonel el-Qaddafi’s 42-year grip on power, inspired by the uprisings that had toppled Arab autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt. When he threatened to annihilate the opposition, NATO intervened and bombed his forces, with the United States a backbone of the operation. Colonel el-Qaddafi was ousted from Tripoli that August.
In the tumult, work on the dam ceased, the prosecutor said.
He pledged that the authorities would take “firm measures” against anyone deemed responsible for failing to properly maintain the two dams. “This is extremely important for protecting the rights of the victims and to determine who was responsible — if there was neglect or dereliction of duty,” said Mr. al-Soor.
He said that the authorities had appointed prosecutors from different parts of Libya to investigate what caused the dams to collapse, inspect houses and determine whether maintenance measures could have prevented the disaster.
More than a decade after Colonel el-Qaddafi’s chaotic ouster, the country remains split between an internationally recognized government in the west and one under Khalifa Hifter, a military commander who controls the east, including Derna.
Derna was a key battleground during the country’s civil war, which saw the city fall under the control of Islamist militias. After a protracted siege, forces loyal to Mr. Hifter declared victory in 2018, although skirmishes continued for several months.
All the while, the neglect of the dams continued.
According to a 2021 report by Libyan state auditors in the west of the country, more than $2.3 million allocated for maintaining the two dams was simply never used. They called it a case of government negligence.
And as recently as last week, less than two days before the dam burst, a Libyan nonprofit, Roya, wrote on Facebook that the dam could fill to bursting during the powerful storm that was sweeping across the Mediterranean.
“We ask the residents of the valley to be very careful,” the group said.
Image
A wide-angle view of a flood-damaged area. There are piles of rubble and a six-story building with one section gouged away.
Residents of Derna said they were issued confusing, sometimes contradictory, orders on whether to evacuate. Many ended up trapped in their apartment buildings as the waters rushed through.Credit...Abdullah Doma/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Even as the waters swelled, some officials, far away in Tripoli, said just after midnight on Monday that the dams were in “good condition” and that there was “no cause for concern about collapse.” They added, however, that the storm had affected their ability to contact those charged with monitoring one of the dams.
Very soon after, well before dawn, the rising waters appear to have overwhelmed the dams — first the larger Abu Mansour dam, then the second, smaller one downstream, which was obliterated in a matter of “moments,” Dr. Ashoor said.
The rampaging tide wiped out large chunks of the city, shattering roads and bridges, washing away cars, and smashing apartment buildings, witnesses said
Whole families were killed, officials say, drowned or trapped under rubble. Others were dragged out to sea.
William F. Marcuson III, a former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that these dams — which were made with clay and rock — were common around the world.
“There’s nothing wrong with that approach, if it is done correctly,” he said. But, he added, the dams must be designed for the maximum rainstorms likely, and be constructed under careful inspection, so that no corners are cut.
The dams included concrete spillways that are supposed to function much like an overflow drain in an ordinary bathtub: If the water rises too high, it goes into the spillway, down underground pipes, and is discharged below the dam.
Scenes From a Deluge: Floods Devastate Libya
Powerful rains destroyed two dams, and the death toll is estimated at more than 5,000.
Sept. 12, 2023
But if the spillway is not built to a sufficient size or the pipes are too narrow for the strength of the storm, the water continues to rise.
When it rises over the top of the dam — called “overtopping” — the dam itself begins to erode. As that happens, the embankment, which supports the dam, is gradually eaten away until the entire structure fails and the water flows freely.
If the upstream dam failed first, a wall of water may have wiped out the lower dam frighteningly quickly.
With no more obstacles in its path, the water tore through the countryside, fanning out over dozens of kilometers. The main force of the raging torrent slid into the natural funnel of the Derna river basin, where residents say they were issued confusing, sometimes contradictory, orders on whether to evacuate.
Source: Videos and imagery of the floods, Google Maps imagery from August 2022
In a televised speech on Thursday, Aguila Saleh, the speaker of the Parliament in the nation’s east, sought to bat away accusations that the scale of the devastation was rooted in government mismanagement and neglect.
“Don’t say, ‘If only we’d done this, if only we’d done that,’” Mr. Saleh said. “What took place in our country was an incomparable natural disaster.”
Dr. Ashoor acknowledged that the flood was prompted by a giant storm rarely seen in the country. But he believes the authorities could have done far more to minimize the risk.
“Political strife, two governments, all of the wars we’ve seen since 2011, terrorism, all the problems we’ve faced,” Dr. Ashoor said. “All of this gathered together to lead to this deteriorating disaster, this calamity we’re living through. May God ease this crisis.”
Image
A bulldozer works at the edge of a large field, where a pit in the reddish-brown dirt holds rows of white body bags.
In Derna, hundreds were hastily buried in mass graves outside the city, health officials said.Credit...Ayman Al-Sahili/Reuters
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Many fake news and conspiracy theories are circulating suggesting that the latest events in Morocco and Libya are man made disaster, of course it is fake news.
But the truth is that technology in several countries has reached the point where rain and earthquake can be triggered artificially even now. Amplifying or slowing a natural phenomena can be done. The question today is not about the capability of doing so but will that knowledge be used in future for good or for evil?
But the truth is that technology in several countries has reached the point where rain and earthquake can be triggered artificially even now. Amplifying or slowing a natural phenomena can be done. The question today is not about the capability of doing so but will that knowledge be used in future for good or for evil?
Darfur’s New Generation, Once Full of Promise, Now Suffers ‘Fire of War’
In a region with a history of genocide, weeks of intense fighting between rival military factions in South Darfur have left hundreds dead and sent thousands fleeing.
Refugees fleeing violence in Sudan at a transit camp last month in Renk, South Sudan. Those who left described an increase in robberies and killings by militias.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Tim
The news he had dreaded arrived a few minutes before midnight.
For weeks, Bahaadin Adam had heard nothing from family members stuck in the fighting that convulsed Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state and the second-largest city in Sudan. Mr. Adam, who had fled weeks before to neighboring South Sudan, remained jittery, constantly checking his phone for updates.
Finally, as he was getting ready for bed, he received a message from his brother. Most of the family had managed to escape Nyala, but his two younger sisters — Meethaaq, 24, and Hana, 10 — had been killed by artillery fire.
“I was broken into pieces,” Mr. Adam said in a recent interview in Renk town in South Sudan.
Five months after a devastating war began in Sudan between rival military forces, the western region of Darfur has quickly become one of the hardest hit in the nation. People in Darfur have already suffered genocidal violence over the past two decades that has left as many as 300,000 people dead.
Now Darfur, which had been edging toward relative stability, is being torn apart by a nationwide war between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The Rapid Support Forces and its allies, predominantly Arab militias, have assumed control of large parts of Darfur, while the regular army mostly operates from garrisons in major cities, residents and observers said.
Image
Bahaadin Adam sitting in a tent in Renk, South Sudan.
Bahaadin Adam at a transit camp in Renk after fleeing fighting in Darfur. Most of his family escaped Nyala, the second largest city in Sudan, but two sisters were killed by artillery fire.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
As the two sides battle for supremacy, civilians have increasingly been caught in the crossfire, particularly in recent weeks. More than 40 people were killed late last month as they took cover under a bridge in Nyala, and at least 40 died in air raids in the city this month, activists and medical workers said. The discovery of mass graves, including more than a dozen last week by the United Nations, has raised fears of a resurgence of ethnically motivated attacks in Darfur — and pushed the International Criminal Court to begin a new investigation into accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the region.
Frantic and sometimes competing diplomatic efforts to end the conflict — by the United Nations, African countries, Saudi Arabia and the United States — have gone nowhere.
Last week, the U.N. special envoy to Sudan, Volker Perthes, resigned months after Sudanese officials declared him unwelcome in the country. In his farewell speech to the U.N. Security Council, Mr. Perthes warned that the conflict “could be morphing into a full-scale civil war.” The head of the army, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is set to address the U.N. General Assembly this week in New York.
Amid the rain of mortar shells, displacement levels are soaring, food prices are skyrocketing and millions of people are now on the verge of famine. More than 1.5 million people have been internally displaced in Darfur since mid-April, according to the U.N. refugee agency, the highest of any region in Sudan. Hundreds of thousands more civilians from the region have streamed into transit centers and refugee camps in neighboring nations.
Eight lawyers and at least 10 human rights advocates have been killed and their offices ransacked in Darfur in recent weeks, raising fears they were being targeted for documenting human rights violations or providing legal support to victims, according to Elsadig Ali Hassan, the acting president of the board of the Darfur Bar Association.
In interviews, residents from South Darfur who made it to safety in South Sudan described a rapid increase in robberies and plunder by armed militias allied with the paramilitary forces. With supplies of food and water dwindling, many packed up their meager belongings and left, hungry and weak, for the border.
Image
People sit on carts, one pulled by a donkey, after arriving in Renk, South Sudan.
New arrivals at a processing center in Renk. “It is all just unbearable,” Mamadou Dian Balde, the regional director for the U.N. refugee agency, who recently traveled across parts of Sudan, said in an interview.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
As the number of injuries escalated, medical workers, exhausted, hungry and lacking critical supplies, watched as their patients died or their wounds festered for lack of treatment. Families, afraid of incoming fire, quickly buried their loved ones in shallow or unmarked graves.
“Another generation from Darfur is learning to live with war and atrocities,” said Maha Mohamed, a Sudanese refugee from Nyala who was at the transit center in Renk. “It’s a tragedy.”
The continued hostilities in Darfur risk plunging the country into a prolonged war, observers say, with the potential for spillover into neighboring countries. In recent weeks, the head of the army, General al-Burhan, has traveled abroad and met with leaders of nations including Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and South Sudan in an effort to build his legitimacy and dismiss the Rapid Security Forces as a rebel group.
The paramilitary chief, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, has fired back, accusing General al-Burhan of trying to “impersonate the head of state” and planning to establish a “war government” in the coastal city of Port Sudan.
His comments came as the violence intensified in the locked-down Sudanese capital, Khartoum, where an airstrike last week killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 60, doctors and aid workers said.
“It is all just unbearable,” Mamadou Dian Balde, the regional director for the U.N. refugee agency, who recently traveled across parts of Sudan, said in an interview.
Some of those fleeing the conflict in the states of South and East Darfur are being relocated to several aid camps in South Sudan, a nation encumbered by its own political, economic and social challenges.
Image
A woman carries a child and a jug of water between tents at a refugee camp in Aweil, South Sudan.
The Wedwil settlement in Aweil, South Sudan, has almost 9,000 Sudanese refugees.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
One of those camps, the Wedwil refugee settlement in Aweil town, is home to almost 9,000 Sudanese. Every evening, families there huddle in groups, share sweet tea and coffee, pray together and listen to Sudanese music. Many of them were professionals and successful traders, all now united by a grinding war that has ripped apart everything they worked so hard to build.
“The fire of war has enveloped everything in Darfur,” said Ahmed Abubakar, 35, a teacher, who fled Nyala in South Darfur.
Mr. Abubakar said members of the paramilitary forces raided his home, accused him of being an army officer and threatened to shoot him in front of his wife and three children. But he beseeched them not to, he said, telling them about his job teaching geography and history and his wife’s work as a nursery school teacher. After more than an hour, the armed men agreed to let them go, he said, but not before they took almost everything of value in the house.
The memories of that day and the family’s harrowing journey to safety continue to haunt the children, he said. His daughter Minan, 3, clings to him everywhere he goes. His 5-year-old son, Mustafa, constantly asks when he can go back to school.
“I had ambitions for myself and my children,” Mr. Abubakar said. “But I cannot see any light at the end of the tunnel.”
Mr. Adam, who lost both his sisters, shared the same feelings of loss and hopelessness.
Before the war broke out on April 15, he was looking forward to marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, celebrating his sister’s graduation from college and, days later, attending her engagement party. But his sister was gone now, and the entire family was scattered between two countries with limited communications.
“We were once a happy family,” he said on a recent afternoon. “But this war has made everything difficult and everyone sad.”
Image
Ahmed Abubakar at a refugee camp in Aweil, South Sudan.
Ahmed Abubakar at a refugee settlement in Aweil. “I had ambitions for myself and my children,” Mr. Abubakar said. “But I cannot see any light at the end of the tunnel.”Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Refugees fleeing violence in Sudan at a transit camp last month in Renk, South Sudan. Those who left described an increase in robberies and killings by militias.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Tim
The news he had dreaded arrived a few minutes before midnight.
For weeks, Bahaadin Adam had heard nothing from family members stuck in the fighting that convulsed Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state and the second-largest city in Sudan. Mr. Adam, who had fled weeks before to neighboring South Sudan, remained jittery, constantly checking his phone for updates.
Finally, as he was getting ready for bed, he received a message from his brother. Most of the family had managed to escape Nyala, but his two younger sisters — Meethaaq, 24, and Hana, 10 — had been killed by artillery fire.
“I was broken into pieces,” Mr. Adam said in a recent interview in Renk town in South Sudan.
Five months after a devastating war began in Sudan between rival military forces, the western region of Darfur has quickly become one of the hardest hit in the nation. People in Darfur have already suffered genocidal violence over the past two decades that has left as many as 300,000 people dead.
Now Darfur, which had been edging toward relative stability, is being torn apart by a nationwide war between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The Rapid Support Forces and its allies, predominantly Arab militias, have assumed control of large parts of Darfur, while the regular army mostly operates from garrisons in major cities, residents and observers said.
Image
Bahaadin Adam sitting in a tent in Renk, South Sudan.
Bahaadin Adam at a transit camp in Renk after fleeing fighting in Darfur. Most of his family escaped Nyala, the second largest city in Sudan, but two sisters were killed by artillery fire.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
As the two sides battle for supremacy, civilians have increasingly been caught in the crossfire, particularly in recent weeks. More than 40 people were killed late last month as they took cover under a bridge in Nyala, and at least 40 died in air raids in the city this month, activists and medical workers said. The discovery of mass graves, including more than a dozen last week by the United Nations, has raised fears of a resurgence of ethnically motivated attacks in Darfur — and pushed the International Criminal Court to begin a new investigation into accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the region.
Frantic and sometimes competing diplomatic efforts to end the conflict — by the United Nations, African countries, Saudi Arabia and the United States — have gone nowhere.
Last week, the U.N. special envoy to Sudan, Volker Perthes, resigned months after Sudanese officials declared him unwelcome in the country. In his farewell speech to the U.N. Security Council, Mr. Perthes warned that the conflict “could be morphing into a full-scale civil war.” The head of the army, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is set to address the U.N. General Assembly this week in New York.
Amid the rain of mortar shells, displacement levels are soaring, food prices are skyrocketing and millions of people are now on the verge of famine. More than 1.5 million people have been internally displaced in Darfur since mid-April, according to the U.N. refugee agency, the highest of any region in Sudan. Hundreds of thousands more civilians from the region have streamed into transit centers and refugee camps in neighboring nations.
Eight lawyers and at least 10 human rights advocates have been killed and their offices ransacked in Darfur in recent weeks, raising fears they were being targeted for documenting human rights violations or providing legal support to victims, according to Elsadig Ali Hassan, the acting president of the board of the Darfur Bar Association.
In interviews, residents from South Darfur who made it to safety in South Sudan described a rapid increase in robberies and plunder by armed militias allied with the paramilitary forces. With supplies of food and water dwindling, many packed up their meager belongings and left, hungry and weak, for the border.
Image
People sit on carts, one pulled by a donkey, after arriving in Renk, South Sudan.
New arrivals at a processing center in Renk. “It is all just unbearable,” Mamadou Dian Balde, the regional director for the U.N. refugee agency, who recently traveled across parts of Sudan, said in an interview.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
As the number of injuries escalated, medical workers, exhausted, hungry and lacking critical supplies, watched as their patients died or their wounds festered for lack of treatment. Families, afraid of incoming fire, quickly buried their loved ones in shallow or unmarked graves.
“Another generation from Darfur is learning to live with war and atrocities,” said Maha Mohamed, a Sudanese refugee from Nyala who was at the transit center in Renk. “It’s a tragedy.”
The continued hostilities in Darfur risk plunging the country into a prolonged war, observers say, with the potential for spillover into neighboring countries. In recent weeks, the head of the army, General al-Burhan, has traveled abroad and met with leaders of nations including Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and South Sudan in an effort to build his legitimacy and dismiss the Rapid Security Forces as a rebel group.
The paramilitary chief, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, has fired back, accusing General al-Burhan of trying to “impersonate the head of state” and planning to establish a “war government” in the coastal city of Port Sudan.
His comments came as the violence intensified in the locked-down Sudanese capital, Khartoum, where an airstrike last week killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 60, doctors and aid workers said.
“It is all just unbearable,” Mamadou Dian Balde, the regional director for the U.N. refugee agency, who recently traveled across parts of Sudan, said in an interview.
Some of those fleeing the conflict in the states of South and East Darfur are being relocated to several aid camps in South Sudan, a nation encumbered by its own political, economic and social challenges.
Image
A woman carries a child and a jug of water between tents at a refugee camp in Aweil, South Sudan.
The Wedwil settlement in Aweil, South Sudan, has almost 9,000 Sudanese refugees.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
One of those camps, the Wedwil refugee settlement in Aweil town, is home to almost 9,000 Sudanese. Every evening, families there huddle in groups, share sweet tea and coffee, pray together and listen to Sudanese music. Many of them were professionals and successful traders, all now united by a grinding war that has ripped apart everything they worked so hard to build.
“The fire of war has enveloped everything in Darfur,” said Ahmed Abubakar, 35, a teacher, who fled Nyala in South Darfur.
Mr. Abubakar said members of the paramilitary forces raided his home, accused him of being an army officer and threatened to shoot him in front of his wife and three children. But he beseeched them not to, he said, telling them about his job teaching geography and history and his wife’s work as a nursery school teacher. After more than an hour, the armed men agreed to let them go, he said, but not before they took almost everything of value in the house.
The memories of that day and the family’s harrowing journey to safety continue to haunt the children, he said. His daughter Minan, 3, clings to him everywhere he goes. His 5-year-old son, Mustafa, constantly asks when he can go back to school.
“I had ambitions for myself and my children,” Mr. Abubakar said. “But I cannot see any light at the end of the tunnel.”
Mr. Adam, who lost both his sisters, shared the same feelings of loss and hopelessness.
Before the war broke out on April 15, he was looking forward to marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, celebrating his sister’s graduation from college and, days later, attending her engagement party. But his sister was gone now, and the entire family was scattered between two countries with limited communications.
“We were once a happy family,” he said on a recent afternoon. “But this war has made everything difficult and everyone sad.”
Image
Ahmed Abubakar at a refugee camp in Aweil, South Sudan.
Ahmed Abubakar at a refugee settlement in Aweil. “I had ambitions for myself and my children,” Mr. Abubakar said. “But I cannot see any light at the end of the tunnel.”Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3
At Least 100 Are Killed in Fire at Wedding Hall in Iraq
The fire spread quickly in part because of highly flammable building materials, state media reported
MOSUL, Iraq — A fire that raced through a hall hosting a Christian wedding in northern Iraq killed at least 100 people and injured 150 others, the authorities said on Wednesday, warning that the death toll could rise.
The fire happened in the Hamdaniya area of Nineveh Province, the authorities said. That is a predominantly Christian area just outside of the city of Mosul, some 205 miles northwest of the capital, Baghdad.
Television footage showed flames rushing over the wedding hall as the fire took hold. In the blaze’s aftermath, only charred metal and debris could be seen as people walked through the scene, the only light coming from television cameras and onlookers’ mobile phones.
Survivors arrived at local hospitals, receiving oxygen and bandages, as family members milled through hallways and outside.
A Health Ministry spokesman, Saif al-Badr, provided the casualty figures via the state-run Iraqi News Agency. “All efforts are being made to provide relief to those affected by the unfortunate accident,” he said.
The health department in Nineveh Province later said that 114 people had died.
Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, ordered an investigation into the fire and asked officials with the interior and health ministries to provide relief, his office said in a statement online.
Najim al-Jubouri, the governor of Nineveh, said some of the injured had been transferred to regional hospitals. He cautioned that there were not yet final casualty figures from the blaze, which suggested that the death toll might rise further.
There was no immediate official word on the cause of the blaze, but initial reports by the Kurdish television news channel Rudaw suggested that fireworks at the venue may have started it.
Civil defense officials quoted by the Iraqi News Agency described the wedding hall’s exterior as being decorated with highly flammable cladding that is illegal in the country.
It wasn’t immediately clear why the authorities had allowed the cladding to be used in the hall, but corruption and mismanagement remain endemic in Iraq two decades after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
While some types of cladding can be made with fire-resistant material, experts say the kinds that caught fire at the wedding hall, and have caught fire elsewhere, weren’t designed to meet strict safety standards, and have often been put into buildings without any breaks that would slow or halt a possible blaze. Such cladding was a factor in the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in London, which killed 72 people, and in multiple high-rise fires in the United Arab Emirates.
The fire in Iraq was the latest disaster to strike the country’s shrinking Christian minority, which over the past two decades has been violently targeted by extremists, first from Al Qaeda and later from the Islamic State militant group. Although the Nineveh plains, the historic homeland of Iraqi Christians, were wrested back from the Islamic State six years ago, some towns there are still mostly rubble and lack basic services. Many Christians have left for Europe, Australia or the United States.
The number of Christians in Iraq today is estimated at 150,000, compared to 1.5 million in 2003. Iraq’s total population is more than 40 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3
MOSUL, Iraq — A fire that raced through a hall hosting a Christian wedding in northern Iraq killed at least 100 people and injured 150 others, the authorities said on Wednesday, warning that the death toll could rise.
The fire happened in the Hamdaniya area of Nineveh Province, the authorities said. That is a predominantly Christian area just outside of the city of Mosul, some 205 miles northwest of the capital, Baghdad.
Television footage showed flames rushing over the wedding hall as the fire took hold. In the blaze’s aftermath, only charred metal and debris could be seen as people walked through the scene, the only light coming from television cameras and onlookers’ mobile phones.
Survivors arrived at local hospitals, receiving oxygen and bandages, as family members milled through hallways and outside.
A Health Ministry spokesman, Saif al-Badr, provided the casualty figures via the state-run Iraqi News Agency. “All efforts are being made to provide relief to those affected by the unfortunate accident,” he said.
The health department in Nineveh Province later said that 114 people had died.
Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, ordered an investigation into the fire and asked officials with the interior and health ministries to provide relief, his office said in a statement online.
Najim al-Jubouri, the governor of Nineveh, said some of the injured had been transferred to regional hospitals. He cautioned that there were not yet final casualty figures from the blaze, which suggested that the death toll might rise further.
There was no immediate official word on the cause of the blaze, but initial reports by the Kurdish television news channel Rudaw suggested that fireworks at the venue may have started it.
Civil defense officials quoted by the Iraqi News Agency described the wedding hall’s exterior as being decorated with highly flammable cladding that is illegal in the country.
It wasn’t immediately clear why the authorities had allowed the cladding to be used in the hall, but corruption and mismanagement remain endemic in Iraq two decades after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
While some types of cladding can be made with fire-resistant material, experts say the kinds that caught fire at the wedding hall, and have caught fire elsewhere, weren’t designed to meet strict safety standards, and have often been put into buildings without any breaks that would slow or halt a possible blaze. Such cladding was a factor in the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in London, which killed 72 people, and in multiple high-rise fires in the United Arab Emirates.
The fire in Iraq was the latest disaster to strike the country’s shrinking Christian minority, which over the past two decades has been violently targeted by extremists, first from Al Qaeda and later from the Islamic State militant group. Although the Nineveh plains, the historic homeland of Iraqi Christians, were wrested back from the Islamic State six years ago, some towns there are still mostly rubble and lack basic services. Many Christians have left for Europe, Australia or the United States.
The number of Christians in Iraq today is estimated at 150,000, compared to 1.5 million in 2003. Iraq’s total population is more than 40 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3
As Hundreds Were Celebrating a Wedding, It Turned Into an Inferno
As the bride and groom danced, witnesses said, flares were set off at the venue in northern Iraq, starting a fire that spread with astonishing speed and killed more than 100 people.
The bride and groom had just swept onto the dance floor — her dress billowing around her — for the traditional “slow dance” while people lit flares to add excitement to the romantic moment. But the flames shot upward, igniting the decorations draped over the chandeliers and hung from the ceiling, turning a night of celebration into a time of mourning.
Fragments of the flaming decorations dropped onto tables and wedding guests. By the time the fire was out, about 100 people were dead and 150 others were injured, suffering from severe burns or smoke inhalation. Early counts estimated that almost a quarter of the guests were either dead or hurt.
The fire broke out on Tuesday night in the Al Haithem wedding hall near the village of Qaraqosh, in Hamdaniya, about 20 miles southeast of Mosul. Christians have lived in the area, known as the Nineveh Plain, for nearly 2,000 years, but many fled the Islamic State in 2014. Only in the last several years have they begun to return and raise families again in these small villages, local officials said.
The toll of those killed and injured was so high, witnesses suggested, because at the moment the blaze began, the lights went out. The guests were unable to see, and stumbled and fell as they rushed toward the main entrance of the wedding hall, said Nabil Ibrahim, a guest.
When the decorations, which he described as “feather-like things,” burst into flames, he said, “it was like gas being poured on the fire.”
The decorations “started falling on people like a volcano, and shortly after the power went off,” he said.
ImageThe ruins of a wedding hall after a fire.
The charred interior of the wedding hall on Wednesday.Credit...Zaid Al-Obeidi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“Some people fell under the chairs, and they couldn’t get out,” he said. “The only way out was the front door, which is a small door — like one meter and half across — and nobody knows about the door of the kitchen.”
That was the door he escaped through, helping others out as well, he said. He knew about the kitchen exit only because his son had been married in the same wedding hall.
Another guest, Gorges Yohana, said the fire had moved with astonishing speed. The roof caught fire within seconds, he said.
“I helped, like, seven or eight people, but I couldn’t help more because I was choking from the smoke and my eyes were stinging and streaming,” he said.
At some point during the smoke and confusion, the bride and groom were able to escape, relatives said.
Weddings in Iraq are often large and expensive celebrations even for those of modest means, and regardless of whether the families are Muslim or Christian. This wedding was no exception.
As the fire intensified, a bulldozer was used to knock openings in the wall in an attempt to allow people to escape, witnesses said. But the ensuing influx of oxygen may have fed the flames, which then seemed to engulf the entire building and sent smoke billowing into the air, as numerous photos and videos on social media indicated.
Firefighters rushed to the scene, but some onlookers said their hoses had not seemed to work immediately.
The district’s mayor, Issam Behnam, said scores of people from Hamdaniya alone had died, including some of his own relatives.
Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani of Iraq on Wednesday called for an investigation into the cause of the fire, and, among other steps, ordered the civil defense force to undertake “intensified periodic inspections” of malls, restaurants, event halls and hotels.
On Wednesday evening, the Kurdish regional government detained the wedding hall’s owner, identified by the Kurdistan Region Security Council as Samir Sulaiman, of Erbil, the Kurdish capital. The government handed him over to the Interior Ministry based on findings by the Investigation Court in Mosul, after an inquiry at the scene. The court found that the fire started at 11:30 on Tuesday night, and that while it was started by the flares, the blaze was exacerbated by and raced through the hall because of the “highly flammable fabrics, which caused the ceiling to catch fire.”
The Nineveh Governorate’s civil defense force noted, in its own report released Wednesday evening, that “the wedding hall was covered with highly flammable Ecobond panels in violation of safety instructions,” and lacked a sprinkler system.
Image
A large crowd, photographed from above.
A funeral for victims of the fire in Hamdaniya, Iraq, on Wednesday.Credit...Abdullah Rashid/Reuters
The fire hit especially hard in the small Christian communities that dot northern Iraq, said several Christian priests who were attending funerals or performing them in the aftermath of the tragedy. Their communities, some of the most ancient in the Christian world — Syriac Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, Chaldean and Assyrian Church of the East, among others — have been decimated over the 20 years since the American invasion, shrinking to fewer than 400,000 Christians today from some 1.5 million.
Many Christians left after attacks by Al Qaeda and by Shiite extremists, but the Christian villages of the Nineveh Plain hung on — until the invasion by the Islamic State in 2014, said Father Charbel Isso, a Syriac Catholic priest in Qaraqosh, where the fire took place.
The Islamic State forced out almost all the Christians. They began to return only after 2017, when the Islamic State was driven out of Mosul. Christians returned slowly in part because Muslims who had fought the Islamic State had taken up residence, sometimes moving into Christian homes, and many no longer felt safe or welcome. The visit by Pope Francis in 2021 boosted their confidence, especially in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain.
“All of us were refugees in Kurdistan, and when we returned, we found all of our things and properties either looted or burned,” Father Isso said.
“Even during ISIS,” he said, “we didn’t lose victims as we did” in this fire.
He spoke as he was helping to prepare the bodies of the burned for burial. Two cousins on his father’s side died in the fire, he said. He planned to attend and deliver prayers at the funerals of 50 of his friends and neighbors on Thursday morning.
Image
Ruins in an Iraqi city.
The Old City district of Mosul was largely destroyed during the fighting to oust the Islamic State in 2017.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
On Wednesday morning, as people picked through burned mobile phones, stray high-heeled shoes and charred furniture, there was a sense of disbelief and both the longing and fear of finding a memento of a loved one — a piece of jewelry or a half-burned identification document.
Father Isso seemed to be searching for an explanation for the losses, but said he could not get the faces of those he knew out of his mind.
“The features of a burned person are changed, they become like sand or ash,” he said, adding, “This is the kind of disaster one finds it difficult to accept.”
Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad; Sangar Khaleel from Qaraqosh, Iraq; and Ala Mahsoob from Hamdaniya, Iraq.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The bride and groom had just swept onto the dance floor — her dress billowing around her — for the traditional “slow dance” while people lit flares to add excitement to the romantic moment. But the flames shot upward, igniting the decorations draped over the chandeliers and hung from the ceiling, turning a night of celebration into a time of mourning.
Fragments of the flaming decorations dropped onto tables and wedding guests. By the time the fire was out, about 100 people were dead and 150 others were injured, suffering from severe burns or smoke inhalation. Early counts estimated that almost a quarter of the guests were either dead or hurt.
The fire broke out on Tuesday night in the Al Haithem wedding hall near the village of Qaraqosh, in Hamdaniya, about 20 miles southeast of Mosul. Christians have lived in the area, known as the Nineveh Plain, for nearly 2,000 years, but many fled the Islamic State in 2014. Only in the last several years have they begun to return and raise families again in these small villages, local officials said.
The toll of those killed and injured was so high, witnesses suggested, because at the moment the blaze began, the lights went out. The guests were unable to see, and stumbled and fell as they rushed toward the main entrance of the wedding hall, said Nabil Ibrahim, a guest.
When the decorations, which he described as “feather-like things,” burst into flames, he said, “it was like gas being poured on the fire.”
The decorations “started falling on people like a volcano, and shortly after the power went off,” he said.
ImageThe ruins of a wedding hall after a fire.
The charred interior of the wedding hall on Wednesday.Credit...Zaid Al-Obeidi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“Some people fell under the chairs, and they couldn’t get out,” he said. “The only way out was the front door, which is a small door — like one meter and half across — and nobody knows about the door of the kitchen.”
That was the door he escaped through, helping others out as well, he said. He knew about the kitchen exit only because his son had been married in the same wedding hall.
Another guest, Gorges Yohana, said the fire had moved with astonishing speed. The roof caught fire within seconds, he said.
“I helped, like, seven or eight people, but I couldn’t help more because I was choking from the smoke and my eyes were stinging and streaming,” he said.
At some point during the smoke and confusion, the bride and groom were able to escape, relatives said.
Weddings in Iraq are often large and expensive celebrations even for those of modest means, and regardless of whether the families are Muslim or Christian. This wedding was no exception.
As the fire intensified, a bulldozer was used to knock openings in the wall in an attempt to allow people to escape, witnesses said. But the ensuing influx of oxygen may have fed the flames, which then seemed to engulf the entire building and sent smoke billowing into the air, as numerous photos and videos on social media indicated.
Firefighters rushed to the scene, but some onlookers said their hoses had not seemed to work immediately.
The district’s mayor, Issam Behnam, said scores of people from Hamdaniya alone had died, including some of his own relatives.
Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani of Iraq on Wednesday called for an investigation into the cause of the fire, and, among other steps, ordered the civil defense force to undertake “intensified periodic inspections” of malls, restaurants, event halls and hotels.
On Wednesday evening, the Kurdish regional government detained the wedding hall’s owner, identified by the Kurdistan Region Security Council as Samir Sulaiman, of Erbil, the Kurdish capital. The government handed him over to the Interior Ministry based on findings by the Investigation Court in Mosul, after an inquiry at the scene. The court found that the fire started at 11:30 on Tuesday night, and that while it was started by the flares, the blaze was exacerbated by and raced through the hall because of the “highly flammable fabrics, which caused the ceiling to catch fire.”
The Nineveh Governorate’s civil defense force noted, in its own report released Wednesday evening, that “the wedding hall was covered with highly flammable Ecobond panels in violation of safety instructions,” and lacked a sprinkler system.
Image
A large crowd, photographed from above.
A funeral for victims of the fire in Hamdaniya, Iraq, on Wednesday.Credit...Abdullah Rashid/Reuters
The fire hit especially hard in the small Christian communities that dot northern Iraq, said several Christian priests who were attending funerals or performing them in the aftermath of the tragedy. Their communities, some of the most ancient in the Christian world — Syriac Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, Chaldean and Assyrian Church of the East, among others — have been decimated over the 20 years since the American invasion, shrinking to fewer than 400,000 Christians today from some 1.5 million.
Many Christians left after attacks by Al Qaeda and by Shiite extremists, but the Christian villages of the Nineveh Plain hung on — until the invasion by the Islamic State in 2014, said Father Charbel Isso, a Syriac Catholic priest in Qaraqosh, where the fire took place.
The Islamic State forced out almost all the Christians. They began to return only after 2017, when the Islamic State was driven out of Mosul. Christians returned slowly in part because Muslims who had fought the Islamic State had taken up residence, sometimes moving into Christian homes, and many no longer felt safe or welcome. The visit by Pope Francis in 2021 boosted their confidence, especially in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain.
“All of us were refugees in Kurdistan, and when we returned, we found all of our things and properties either looted or burned,” Father Isso said.
“Even during ISIS,” he said, “we didn’t lose victims as we did” in this fire.
He spoke as he was helping to prepare the bodies of the burned for burial. Two cousins on his father’s side died in the fire, he said. He planned to attend and deliver prayers at the funerals of 50 of his friends and neighbors on Thursday morning.
Image
Ruins in an Iraqi city.
The Old City district of Mosul was largely destroyed during the fighting to oust the Islamic State in 2017.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
On Wednesday morning, as people picked through burned mobile phones, stray high-heeled shoes and charred furniture, there was a sense of disbelief and both the longing and fear of finding a memento of a loved one — a piece of jewelry or a half-burned identification document.
Father Isso seemed to be searching for an explanation for the losses, but said he could not get the faces of those he knew out of his mind.
“The features of a burned person are changed, they become like sand or ash,” he said, adding, “This is the kind of disaster one finds it difficult to accept.”
Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad; Sangar Khaleel from Qaraqosh, Iraq; and Ala Mahsoob from Hamdaniya, Iraq.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Blast Kills at Least 52 at a Religious Gathering in Pakistan
The bombing, which officials believe was a suicide attack, was the latest sign of the country’s deteriorating security situation.
Watch video at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/worl ... mbing.html
More than 50 people were killed in a suicide attack in Mastung, a district in southwestern Pakistan.CreditCredit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At least 52 people were killed on Friday in what officials said they believed was a suicide attack at a religious gathering in southwestern Pakistan, the latest sign of the country’s deteriorating security situation.
The blast occurred around midday in Mastung, a district in Balochistan Province. It targeted a procession of hundreds of people who had gathered for Eid Milad un-Nabi, a holiday celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.
The death toll was confirmed by Abdul Rasheed Shahi, Mastung’s district health officer. He said at least 50 more people had been wounded.
“Due to the power of the explosion, several people gathered there died instantly, and many others suffered injuries,” said Javed Lehri, a local police officer.
“We are investigating, but it seems it was a suicide attack,” he added.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the blast, officials said. Among the victims was a police officer.
The blast was the latest attack to unnerve Pakistan, where militant groups have become more active over the past two years after finding a haven in neighboring Afghanistan under the Taliban administration.
Since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021, attacks by extremist groups in Pakistan have become more frequent and more deadly, analysts say, rattling a country that is also battling dual economic and political crises.
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The attack in Mastung was among the most brazen spectacles of militant violence this year. In July, a suicide bombing at a political rally killed 54 people in northwestern Pakistan. In February, attackers carried out an hourslong assault on the police headquarters in Karachi, a major port city. In January, a mosque bombing killed more than 100 people in Peshawar.
Each attack sent a heart-wrenching reminder to Pakistanis across the country: A new wave of militant violence has arrived.
“Today’s incident in Mastung constitutes a major security failure,” said Abdul Basit, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies who covers extremism and militancy in South Asia.
It is “a clear manifestation of how Pakistan’s internal security has become intertwined with developments in Afghanistan,” he added.
The attack began after hundreds of people from across the district gathered for the religious celebration on Friday, which was declared a public holiday in Pakistan, as it is in several other Muslim countries.
An initial investigation of the attack found that a suicide bomber had tried to force his way to the front of the religious procession, according to Jan Achakzai, the provincial information minister of Baluchistan. When a police official intervened and tried to stop him, the bomber detonated his explosives.
ImageA group of people examining a field of debris with an ambulance also on the scene.
Security officials examined the site of the explosion on Friday that targeted a procession marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“After the powerful explosion, I was numbed for a few seconds,” said Shafi Muhammad, a Mastung resident who was part of the procession. “I had never seen such carnage before in my life,” he added.
Videos circulating on social media after the blast showed hundreds of people gathered around bodies splayed across pools of blood. One video showed two men navigating through a pile of bodies until they found someone who was wounded, streaks of red splashed across his blue salwar kameez — the traditional tunic and loosefitting pants. As they picked him up by the arms and carried him away, more bodies became visible beneath him.
Officials declared a state of emergency in all regional hospitals, they said, as rescue teams tried to recover people who were hurt and get them medical attention. Critically injured people were being transferred to the provincial capital, Quetta, about 20 miles away, according to Mr. Achakzai.
The devastating blast in Mastung was one of multiple reminders on Friday alone of the return of militant violence to Pakistan.
Around 500 miles away, in a northwestern stretch of the country, a separate attack killed at least five people and injured about a dozen more, officials said. The attack — in the Hangu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province that borders Afghanistan — began when a man in an explosive-laden car approached the gate of a police station and was killed by an officer, according to Nisar Ahmed, the district police officer.
Moments later nearby, a second blast ripped through a mosque where about 40 people had gathered for Friday Prayer. The mosque’s roof collapsed, trapping dozens of people inside, Mr. Ahmed added. No group immediately claimed responsibility.
Around the same time, the Pakistani military announced that it had thwarted an attempt by militants to infiltrate Pakistani territory near the Afghan border in Balochistan. Three militants and four Pakistani soldiers were killed in the clash, according to a statement by Inter-Services Public Relations, the media wing of the Pakistan Armed Forces.
The blasts and clash added to the growing unease about the recent surge in militant violence, much of which has been carried out by the Pakistani Taliban — a militant group with close ties to the Afghan Taliban that opposes the Pakistani government — and by the Islamic State affiliate in the region.
In a statement released Friday afternoon, the Pakistani Taliban denied any involvement in the suicide blasts. Officials and analysts suspect the attack in Mastung might have been orchestrated by the Islamic State affiliate, which has been behind previous attacks in the district — an area rife with violence involving militant groups that have aligned with the Islamic State in recent years.
“These groups have been responsible for a series of attacks, targeting Hazara Shia pilgrims en route to Iran for religious pilgrimages as well as political rallies,” said Muhammad Amir Rana, a security analyst based in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
For many observers, the possibility of another Islamic State-linked attack in Mastung highlighted how entrenched the group had become in Balochistan, a stretch of mountain and desert that is blessed with natural resources but remains one of the country’s poorest provinces.
While the area has long struggled with violence from local Baluch separatist groups that have fought against political centralization, it has only recently become a nascent stronghold for Islamic State fighters, analysts said.
The attack also called attention to how the Taliban’s brutal campaign cracking down on the Islamic State in Afghanistan has pushed some fighters into Pakistan, further eroding the country’s security as it inches toward elections that are expected to happen early next year, according to Mr. Basit, of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
“To stay relevant and to dispel the impression of the group’s weakness, it is hitting soft targets like politicians and religious gatherings,” he said. “As a result, unfortunately violence is likely to increase and conflict is expected to expand further in the coming weeks and months.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/worl ... mbing.html
Watch video at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/worl ... mbing.html
More than 50 people were killed in a suicide attack in Mastung, a district in southwestern Pakistan.CreditCredit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At least 52 people were killed on Friday in what officials said they believed was a suicide attack at a religious gathering in southwestern Pakistan, the latest sign of the country’s deteriorating security situation.
The blast occurred around midday in Mastung, a district in Balochistan Province. It targeted a procession of hundreds of people who had gathered for Eid Milad un-Nabi, a holiday celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.
The death toll was confirmed by Abdul Rasheed Shahi, Mastung’s district health officer. He said at least 50 more people had been wounded.
“Due to the power of the explosion, several people gathered there died instantly, and many others suffered injuries,” said Javed Lehri, a local police officer.
“We are investigating, but it seems it was a suicide attack,” he added.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the blast, officials said. Among the victims was a police officer.
The blast was the latest attack to unnerve Pakistan, where militant groups have become more active over the past two years after finding a haven in neighboring Afghanistan under the Taliban administration.
Since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021, attacks by extremist groups in Pakistan have become more frequent and more deadly, analysts say, rattling a country that is also battling dual economic and political crises.
//More on Afghanistan
//Fighting for Afghanistan’s Girls: Khalida Popal helped evacuate Afghan female soccer players on the national team after the Taliban takeover. Now she //is demanding that world soccer officials let the women represent their country on the field again.
//Seeking New Battles: As a generation of fighters raised in war now finds itself stuck in a country at peace, young Taliban soldiers are crossing into //Pakistan to continue waging jihad.
//Inside the Resistance Movement: The Taliban takeover in 2021 was so sudden and shocking, these men could not accept defeat. So they embarked on //a mission that they knew was probably impossible: to overthrow the Taliban.
//Beauty Salons: Afghanistan shut down all beauty salons across the country after the Taliban administration declared that the women-only spaces were //forbidden under Shariah law.
The attack in Mastung was among the most brazen spectacles of militant violence this year. In July, a suicide bombing at a political rally killed 54 people in northwestern Pakistan. In February, attackers carried out an hourslong assault on the police headquarters in Karachi, a major port city. In January, a mosque bombing killed more than 100 people in Peshawar.
Each attack sent a heart-wrenching reminder to Pakistanis across the country: A new wave of militant violence has arrived.
“Today’s incident in Mastung constitutes a major security failure,” said Abdul Basit, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies who covers extremism and militancy in South Asia.
It is “a clear manifestation of how Pakistan’s internal security has become intertwined with developments in Afghanistan,” he added.
The attack began after hundreds of people from across the district gathered for the religious celebration on Friday, which was declared a public holiday in Pakistan, as it is in several other Muslim countries.
An initial investigation of the attack found that a suicide bomber had tried to force his way to the front of the religious procession, according to Jan Achakzai, the provincial information minister of Baluchistan. When a police official intervened and tried to stop him, the bomber detonated his explosives.
ImageA group of people examining a field of debris with an ambulance also on the scene.
Security officials examined the site of the explosion on Friday that targeted a procession marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“After the powerful explosion, I was numbed for a few seconds,” said Shafi Muhammad, a Mastung resident who was part of the procession. “I had never seen such carnage before in my life,” he added.
Videos circulating on social media after the blast showed hundreds of people gathered around bodies splayed across pools of blood. One video showed two men navigating through a pile of bodies until they found someone who was wounded, streaks of red splashed across his blue salwar kameez — the traditional tunic and loosefitting pants. As they picked him up by the arms and carried him away, more bodies became visible beneath him.
Officials declared a state of emergency in all regional hospitals, they said, as rescue teams tried to recover people who were hurt and get them medical attention. Critically injured people were being transferred to the provincial capital, Quetta, about 20 miles away, according to Mr. Achakzai.
The devastating blast in Mastung was one of multiple reminders on Friday alone of the return of militant violence to Pakistan.
Around 500 miles away, in a northwestern stretch of the country, a separate attack killed at least five people and injured about a dozen more, officials said. The attack — in the Hangu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province that borders Afghanistan — began when a man in an explosive-laden car approached the gate of a police station and was killed by an officer, according to Nisar Ahmed, the district police officer.
Moments later nearby, a second blast ripped through a mosque where about 40 people had gathered for Friday Prayer. The mosque’s roof collapsed, trapping dozens of people inside, Mr. Ahmed added. No group immediately claimed responsibility.
Around the same time, the Pakistani military announced that it had thwarted an attempt by militants to infiltrate Pakistani territory near the Afghan border in Balochistan. Three militants and four Pakistani soldiers were killed in the clash, according to a statement by Inter-Services Public Relations, the media wing of the Pakistan Armed Forces.
The blasts and clash added to the growing unease about the recent surge in militant violence, much of which has been carried out by the Pakistani Taliban — a militant group with close ties to the Afghan Taliban that opposes the Pakistani government — and by the Islamic State affiliate in the region.
In a statement released Friday afternoon, the Pakistani Taliban denied any involvement in the suicide blasts. Officials and analysts suspect the attack in Mastung might have been orchestrated by the Islamic State affiliate, which has been behind previous attacks in the district — an area rife with violence involving militant groups that have aligned with the Islamic State in recent years.
“These groups have been responsible for a series of attacks, targeting Hazara Shia pilgrims en route to Iran for religious pilgrimages as well as political rallies,” said Muhammad Amir Rana, a security analyst based in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
For many observers, the possibility of another Islamic State-linked attack in Mastung highlighted how entrenched the group had become in Balochistan, a stretch of mountain and desert that is blessed with natural resources but remains one of the country’s poorest provinces.
While the area has long struggled with violence from local Baluch separatist groups that have fought against political centralization, it has only recently become a nascent stronghold for Islamic State fighters, analysts said.
The attack also called attention to how the Taliban’s brutal campaign cracking down on the Islamic State in Afghanistan has pushed some fighters into Pakistan, further eroding the country’s security as it inches toward elections that are expected to happen early next year, according to Mr. Basit, of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
“To stay relevant and to dispel the impression of the group’s weakness, it is hitting soft targets like politicians and religious gatherings,” he said. “As a result, unfortunately violence is likely to increase and conflict is expected to expand further in the coming weeks and months.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/worl ... mbing.html
Gaza Death Toll Has Hit 10,000, Its Health Ministry Says
The figures could not be independently verified, but a Pentagon spokesman acknowledged on Monday that “we know the numbers are in the thousands.”
Civil defense crews on Monday removing a child from the remains of a house in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times
In just under a month, Israeli strikes have killed more than 10,000 people in Gaza and injured more than 25,000 others, the Gaza Health Ministry said on Monday.
The soaring death toll from Israel’s bombardment includes more than 4,100 children, according to the ministry, which operates under the political arm of Hamas. The ministry’s figures could not be independently verified, but a Pentagon spokesman, Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, acknowledged on Monday that “we know the numbers are in the thousands.”
Last month, President Biden cast doubt on death toll numbers coming from the Health Ministry, without offering an explanation. However, its statistics were considered credible enough for the U.S. State Department to cite them in a report released this year that covered previous conflicts.
After Mr. Biden’s remarks, the Health Ministry released a list with the names, ages, genders and ID numbers of all those it counted in its death toll, except for 281 whose remains were unidentifiable. The list included multiple members of numerous families, including 88 from one extended family.
Even before the latest hostilities, more than two million people in Gaza, about half of them children, were trapped by a 16-year Israeli blockade of the territory. After Hamas launched terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 in which, Israeli officials say, more than 1,400 people were killed and more than 240 abducted, Israel began a military campaign it said was aimed at destroying the group.
The grim update on civilian deaths came as Gaza was emerging from a third communications blackout, which coincided with heavy Israeli attacks.
On Monday, the head of the United Nations again urged an immediate humanitarian cease-fire, painting a dire picture. “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children,” Secretary General António Guterres told reporters.
“Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day,” Mr. Guterres said. “More journalists have reportedly been killed over a four-week period than in any conflict in at least three decades. More United Nations aid workers have been killed than in every comparable period in the history of our organization.”
In the first days of its strikes, the Israeli Air Force said it had dropped more than 6,000 bombs on the Gaza Strip, which covers an area roughly half the size of New York City.
On Monday, Mr. Guterres said the bombardment had struck “civilians, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, churches, and U.N. facilities, including shelters.”
Israeli officials have so far resisted calls from the United Nations, international aid groups and protesters in Israel and around the world for a humanitarian pause. But the need for a cease-fire is becoming more urgent by the hour, said the secretary general, pointing to what he said were “clear violations” of international law in the conflict.
“No one is safe,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Civil defense crews on Monday removing a child from the remains of a house in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times
In just under a month, Israeli strikes have killed more than 10,000 people in Gaza and injured more than 25,000 others, the Gaza Health Ministry said on Monday.
The soaring death toll from Israel’s bombardment includes more than 4,100 children, according to the ministry, which operates under the political arm of Hamas. The ministry’s figures could not be independently verified, but a Pentagon spokesman, Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, acknowledged on Monday that “we know the numbers are in the thousands.”
Last month, President Biden cast doubt on death toll numbers coming from the Health Ministry, without offering an explanation. However, its statistics were considered credible enough for the U.S. State Department to cite them in a report released this year that covered previous conflicts.
After Mr. Biden’s remarks, the Health Ministry released a list with the names, ages, genders and ID numbers of all those it counted in its death toll, except for 281 whose remains were unidentifiable. The list included multiple members of numerous families, including 88 from one extended family.
Even before the latest hostilities, more than two million people in Gaza, about half of them children, were trapped by a 16-year Israeli blockade of the territory. After Hamas launched terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 in which, Israeli officials say, more than 1,400 people were killed and more than 240 abducted, Israel began a military campaign it said was aimed at destroying the group.
The grim update on civilian deaths came as Gaza was emerging from a third communications blackout, which coincided with heavy Israeli attacks.
On Monday, the head of the United Nations again urged an immediate humanitarian cease-fire, painting a dire picture. “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children,” Secretary General António Guterres told reporters.
“Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day,” Mr. Guterres said. “More journalists have reportedly been killed over a four-week period than in any conflict in at least three decades. More United Nations aid workers have been killed than in every comparable period in the history of our organization.”
In the first days of its strikes, the Israeli Air Force said it had dropped more than 6,000 bombs on the Gaza Strip, which covers an area roughly half the size of New York City.
On Monday, Mr. Guterres said the bombardment had struck “civilians, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, churches, and U.N. facilities, including shelters.”
Israeli officials have so far resisted calls from the United Nations, international aid groups and protesters in Israel and around the world for a humanitarian pause. But the need for a cease-fire is becoming more urgent by the hour, said the secretary general, pointing to what he said were “clear violations” of international law in the conflict.
“No one is safe,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Reuters
Over 1,000 USAID officials call for Gaza ceasefire in letter
Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis
Updated Fri, November 10, 2023 at 1:23 PM CST·
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -More than 1,000 officials in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have signed an open letter urging the Biden administration to call for an immediate ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas, according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters.
The letter is latest sign of unease within the U.S. government over President Joe Biden's unwavering support for Israel in its response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Palestinian Hamas militants that killed 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Washington has rebuffed calls from Arab and Palestinian leaders and others to call for Israel to halt its assault on the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip which has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians, including over 4,500 children, according to Gaza's health ministry.
"(W)e are alarmed and disheartened at the numerous violations of international law; laws which aim to protect civilians, medical and media personnel, as well as schools, hospitals, and places of worship," the letter reads.
"We believe that further catastrophic loss of human life can only be avoided if the United States Government calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza."
The letter, published on Nov. 2, had now garnered 1,029 signatures from staff of the U.S. aid agency. Signatories' names are hidden but the letter shows it was signed by officials in many of the agency's bureaus in Washington as well as officials posted around the world.
"We appreciate the ongoing dialogue we have with our dedicated staff and partners, and continue to welcome our team to share their opinions with leadership," USAID Spokesperson Jessica Jennings said in an emailed response.
It comes amid protests in the United States and elsewhere calling for a ceasefire, and widespread concern among officials over the U.S. response to the Middle East crisis, which has included the public resignation of one State Department official who said he opposed continued lethal assistance to Israel.
More than 500 people who worked on Biden's 2020 election campaign on Thursday published a letter, seen by Reuters, calling for the president to support an immediate ceasefire, and a group of congressional staffers held a vigil on Wednesday at the Capitol demanding a ceasefire, images on social media showed.
A source familiar with the matter said there has been "deep frustration" among officials in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and how the administration has given what the sources see as a "carte-blanche" to Israel, allowing it conduct a military offensive in Gaza.
The source said they were aware of at least four cables that have been drafted for the State Department's internal "dissent channel," which allows diplomats to raise concerns about policy anonymously with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The State Department does not confirm the existence of dissent cables.
The department has held a number of listening sessions in the past month, including in U.S. missions in the Middle East, two sources who attended the sessions said.
Deputy State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said on Thursday it has been important for Blinken and other leaders to "engage directly with the workforce," a reference to listening sessions held with concerned staff.
"We also recognize that this has been a trying time for our workforce," Patel said.
"We have ensured that our missions around the world, particularly those that might be more heightened attention right now to what’s happening in the Middle East have access to those resources and are able to interface with department leaders about not just what’s happening in the region, but the ways that this department can continue to serve them."
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis, Editing by Angus MacSwan and Diane Craft)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ov ... 44743.html
Over 1,000 USAID officials call for Gaza ceasefire in letter
Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis
Updated Fri, November 10, 2023 at 1:23 PM CST·
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -More than 1,000 officials in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have signed an open letter urging the Biden administration to call for an immediate ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas, according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters.
The letter is latest sign of unease within the U.S. government over President Joe Biden's unwavering support for Israel in its response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Palestinian Hamas militants that killed 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Washington has rebuffed calls from Arab and Palestinian leaders and others to call for Israel to halt its assault on the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip which has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians, including over 4,500 children, according to Gaza's health ministry.
"(W)e are alarmed and disheartened at the numerous violations of international law; laws which aim to protect civilians, medical and media personnel, as well as schools, hospitals, and places of worship," the letter reads.
"We believe that further catastrophic loss of human life can only be avoided if the United States Government calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza."
The letter, published on Nov. 2, had now garnered 1,029 signatures from staff of the U.S. aid agency. Signatories' names are hidden but the letter shows it was signed by officials in many of the agency's bureaus in Washington as well as officials posted around the world.
"We appreciate the ongoing dialogue we have with our dedicated staff and partners, and continue to welcome our team to share their opinions with leadership," USAID Spokesperson Jessica Jennings said in an emailed response.
It comes amid protests in the United States and elsewhere calling for a ceasefire, and widespread concern among officials over the U.S. response to the Middle East crisis, which has included the public resignation of one State Department official who said he opposed continued lethal assistance to Israel.
More than 500 people who worked on Biden's 2020 election campaign on Thursday published a letter, seen by Reuters, calling for the president to support an immediate ceasefire, and a group of congressional staffers held a vigil on Wednesday at the Capitol demanding a ceasefire, images on social media showed.
A source familiar with the matter said there has been "deep frustration" among officials in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and how the administration has given what the sources see as a "carte-blanche" to Israel, allowing it conduct a military offensive in Gaza.
The source said they were aware of at least four cables that have been drafted for the State Department's internal "dissent channel," which allows diplomats to raise concerns about policy anonymously with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The State Department does not confirm the existence of dissent cables.
The department has held a number of listening sessions in the past month, including in U.S. missions in the Middle East, two sources who attended the sessions said.
Deputy State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said on Thursday it has been important for Blinken and other leaders to "engage directly with the workforce," a reference to listening sessions held with concerned staff.
"We also recognize that this has been a trying time for our workforce," Patel said.
"We have ensured that our missions around the world, particularly those that might be more heightened attention right now to what’s happening in the Middle East have access to those resources and are able to interface with department leaders about not just what’s happening in the region, but the ways that this department can continue to serve them."
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis, Editing by Angus MacSwan and Diane Craft)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ov ... 44743.html
“People are dying like insects.”
Seizing Darfur Region, Paramilitary Forces Are Accused of Atrocities
Seven months into Sudan’s civil war, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and its allies are ransacking and capturing the Darfur region. An aid worker said, “People are dying like insects.”
A Sudanese woman mourning a relative she said was killed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. She had fled from El Geneina in the Darfur region in July, across the border into Chad.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
Bodies littered the road out of El Geneina, a town in western Sudan, as Dr. Rodwan Mustafa and his family sped down a bumpy road that led to the border with Chad and, they hoped, safety.
A day earlier, rampaging Arab militiamen had grabbed Dr. Mustafa by the neck, accusing him of giving medical care to enemy fighters. That was his signal to run.
Racing toward the border with his family in a car, he saw chickens clucking over the bloodied corpses of those who hadn’t fled in time. A camp for displaced people stood empty, burned to the ground. He spotted a dismembered hand on the roadside.
“The smell of death was everywhere,” said Dr. Mustafa, who made it to a refugee camp in Chad and spoke by phone from there.
Seven months into Sudan’s disastrous civil war, new horrors have accompanied the latest fighting in Darfur, a sprawling region in the west of the country where a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, has scored a succession of sweeping victories over Sudan’s regular military in recent weeks.
After capturing three of Darfur’s five state capitals, including El Geneina on Nov. 4, the paramilitary group is on the verge of seizing the entire region, according to residents, analysts and United Nations officials interviewed in recent days.
Although that tilts the war in favor of the paramilitary group’s commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, neither side looks capable of outright victory, according to African and western officials — a stalemate that has deepened civilian suffering. The R.S.F.’s recent victories have also come at the cost of ethnic violence that recalls the genocidal massacres that brought global attention to Darfur just over two decades ago.
Earlier this month, more than 800 people were killed as R.S.F. and allied Arab fighters overran the army garrison in El Geneina, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Homes were razed and United Nations supplies looted, the agency said. Routed Sudanese soldiers fled across the border into Chad, carrying stores of ammunition.
Image
Burned vehicles and clay pots stand on scorched earth near trees and small one-story cream buildings.
Destruction in a market area in El Fasher, capital of Sudan’s North Darfur State, in September.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Aid workers and witnesses also reported sexual violence, torture and killings of members of the Masalit, an ethnic African group with a long history of conflict with ethnic Arabs.
“They came to massacre us,” said Ahmed Sharif, a schoolteacher who fled El Geneina on Nov. 5 and walked 13 hours to reach Chad.
//Violence in Sudan
//Fighting between two military factions has thrown Sudan into chaos, with plans for a transition to a civilian-led democracy now in shambles.
What to Know: Two generals have been vying for power in the African country in a conflict that began in April. Millions of Sudanese people have fled, but many are stuck in war zones struggling to survive.
//Darfur: The discovery of a mass graves and the killing of a powerful governor have heightened worries that fighting between the country’s warring military factions is pushing a region blighted by genocide two decades ago into a new ethnic civil war.
//Leaving Everything Behind: Thanasis Pagoulatos led his family business, Khartoum’s oldest inn, through decades of tumult. Sudan’s latest breakdown proved too much.
//A Generation’s Catastrophe: With an estimated 19 million children out of school for months because of war, U.N. officials warned that Sudan is on the verge of becoming “the worst education crisis in the world.”
Filippo Grandi, the head of the United Nations refugee agency, said: “Twenty years ago, the world was shocked by the terrible atrocities in Darfur. We fear a similar dynamic might be developing.”
The dire situation is not yet a full repeat of the early 2000s, when the scorched-earth tactics of Arab militiamen caused the International Criminal Court to file charges of genocide against Sudanese leaders, including the former president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was deposed in 2019.
This time, diplomats and analysts say, the ethnic violence is more a byproduct of the national battle between forces loyal to the army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and General Hamdan, rather than a coordinated campaign of slaughter.
The R.S.F. wants to present itself as a responsible group that could one day govern Sudan. In an emailed response to questions, it blamed Sudan’s army for the recent deaths in El Geneina, accusing it of shelling civilian neighborhoods. A formal investigation of possible abuses is underway, the group said.
But promises of transparency from a paramilitary group that grew out of the feared militias known as the Janjaweed that terrorized Darfur in the 2000s are viewed with wide skepticism. In private, R.S.F. officials conceded that undisciplined fighters have carried out abuses, diplomats say. And in July, the International Criminal Court opened a new investigation into possible war crimes in Darfur.
Image
Mohamed Hamdan, wearing a military uniform, speaks into a microphone while standing in a crowd of fighters holding long guns and wearing head scarves.
A video posted on social media by the Rapid Support Forces in July purporting to show Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, the forces’ commander, addressing fighters at an undisclosed location.Credit...via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Still, the dynamic could quickly change if other armed groups in Darfur, currently sitting on the fence, decide to join the fray.
After months of grinding battle in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, where fighting first erupted in April, the Rapid Support Forces have turned their focus back to Darfur, the region where most of the group’s fighters are originally from. It captured in quick succession Nyala, Sudan’s second-largest city, Zalingei in Central Darfur and El Geneina.
Now, battle rages in El Fasher, the last stronghold of the army in Darfur. If that falls, experts say, most of Sudan west of the Nile will be in R.S.F. hands.
“El Fasher is the last big domino yet to fall,” said Alan Boswell, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.
The battle’s outcome depends in part on decisions taken by Minni Minnawi, the regional governor of Darfur, whose armed forces are concentrated around El Fasher. So far, they have avoided taking sides in the war. And although Mr. Minnawi is a longtime R.S.F. rival, many doubt that his fighters have the strength to confront the paramilitary group now.
“Fighting looks like a bad proposition for them,” Mr. Boswell said.
Image
Fighters sit atop small military vehicles traveling down a road near electrical poles and a white truck parked on the other side.
A military convoy accompanying the regional governor of Darfur, Minni Minawi, in August on the way to Port Sudan, which is held by the Sudanese military and is now the center of government.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The changes highlight how much ground Sudan’s military, long seen as the backbone of the state, has lost in this war. Unable to dislodge the R.S.F. from Khartoum, the military has been forced to shift most government functions to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, in the country’s far east. Aid groups and U.N. missions are also working from there.
International efforts to broker a cease-fire, led by the United States and Saudi Arabia, have failed to find compromise. The latest talks last week in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, produced little. And the humanitarian cost is soaring.
So far, at least 10,400 people have died, mostly in Khartoum and Darfur, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, although Sudanese health workers say the real toll is most likely much higher.
Nearly five million people — about one-tenth of Sudan’s population — have been internally displaced, and an additional 1.2 million have fled into neighboring countries, mostly Chad, South Sudan and Egypt.
Half of Sudan’s 46 million people need aid to survive, the United Nations says.
Image
Abdel Fattah al-Burhan walking on an airport tarmac with other military figures, and a mostly white plane is behind them.
Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan arriving with officials and guards at the military airport in Port Sudan in August.Credit...Ibrahim Mohammed Ishak/Reuters
A handful of aid groups have trickled back into West Darfur in recent months after reaching agreements with the R.S.F. and Arab militias. Their employees describe massacres of civilians, dozens of reported rapes, orphaned children and refugee-filled schools.
Will Carter, the Sudan director of the Norwegian Refugee Council, blamed the world for turning its back on Sudan. “The sheer number of deaths, the scale of the devastation in Darfur and the lack of attention show how the international system is failing right in front of our eyes,” he said.
Ali Salam, an aid coordinator with the Sudanese American Physicians Association, said he had seen “unbelievable” things during a recent visit to refugee camps in Chad near the Sudanese border. One woman arrived at a camp with a dead child strapped to her back, unaware that the child had died along the way, he said.
“People are dying like insects in Darfur,” he said.
As events in the Middle East preoccupy the United States, for years a major influence in Sudan, there is even less scrutiny of foreign powers accused of fueling Sudan’s war, like the United Arab Emirates. An investigation showed the Emiratis are smuggling arms to General Hamdan from a base in Chad, or Egypt, which backs Sudan’s military.
Two decades ago, the cause of peace in Sudan was embraced by Western celebrities and activists who held marches in Washington under the “Save Darfur” banner. This time, many in Sudan feel that the world has turned its back on them.
“How many more lives will it take for the world to step in, for people to care?” said Omnia Mustafa, a 21-year-old Sudanese woman (not related to Dr. Mustafa) who appealed on TikTok this week for outsiders to take notice of her country’s plight.
“I’m sick and tired of our suffering falling into deaf ears,” she said. “We are also people, like everyone else.”
Image
Women and children in a large hangar-type building with yellow walls and bedding laid out on the floor.
A camp for the internally displaced in al-Suwar, Sudan, in June.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Seven months into Sudan’s civil war, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and its allies are ransacking and capturing the Darfur region. An aid worker said, “People are dying like insects.”
A Sudanese woman mourning a relative she said was killed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. She had fled from El Geneina in the Darfur region in July, across the border into Chad.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
Bodies littered the road out of El Geneina, a town in western Sudan, as Dr. Rodwan Mustafa and his family sped down a bumpy road that led to the border with Chad and, they hoped, safety.
A day earlier, rampaging Arab militiamen had grabbed Dr. Mustafa by the neck, accusing him of giving medical care to enemy fighters. That was his signal to run.
Racing toward the border with his family in a car, he saw chickens clucking over the bloodied corpses of those who hadn’t fled in time. A camp for displaced people stood empty, burned to the ground. He spotted a dismembered hand on the roadside.
“The smell of death was everywhere,” said Dr. Mustafa, who made it to a refugee camp in Chad and spoke by phone from there.
Seven months into Sudan’s disastrous civil war, new horrors have accompanied the latest fighting in Darfur, a sprawling region in the west of the country where a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, has scored a succession of sweeping victories over Sudan’s regular military in recent weeks.
After capturing three of Darfur’s five state capitals, including El Geneina on Nov. 4, the paramilitary group is on the verge of seizing the entire region, according to residents, analysts and United Nations officials interviewed in recent days.
Although that tilts the war in favor of the paramilitary group’s commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, neither side looks capable of outright victory, according to African and western officials — a stalemate that has deepened civilian suffering. The R.S.F.’s recent victories have also come at the cost of ethnic violence that recalls the genocidal massacres that brought global attention to Darfur just over two decades ago.
Earlier this month, more than 800 people were killed as R.S.F. and allied Arab fighters overran the army garrison in El Geneina, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Homes were razed and United Nations supplies looted, the agency said. Routed Sudanese soldiers fled across the border into Chad, carrying stores of ammunition.
Image
Burned vehicles and clay pots stand on scorched earth near trees and small one-story cream buildings.
Destruction in a market area in El Fasher, capital of Sudan’s North Darfur State, in September.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Aid workers and witnesses also reported sexual violence, torture and killings of members of the Masalit, an ethnic African group with a long history of conflict with ethnic Arabs.
“They came to massacre us,” said Ahmed Sharif, a schoolteacher who fled El Geneina on Nov. 5 and walked 13 hours to reach Chad.
//Violence in Sudan
//Fighting between two military factions has thrown Sudan into chaos, with plans for a transition to a civilian-led democracy now in shambles.
What to Know: Two generals have been vying for power in the African country in a conflict that began in April. Millions of Sudanese people have fled, but many are stuck in war zones struggling to survive.
//Darfur: The discovery of a mass graves and the killing of a powerful governor have heightened worries that fighting between the country’s warring military factions is pushing a region blighted by genocide two decades ago into a new ethnic civil war.
//Leaving Everything Behind: Thanasis Pagoulatos led his family business, Khartoum’s oldest inn, through decades of tumult. Sudan’s latest breakdown proved too much.
//A Generation’s Catastrophe: With an estimated 19 million children out of school for months because of war, U.N. officials warned that Sudan is on the verge of becoming “the worst education crisis in the world.”
Filippo Grandi, the head of the United Nations refugee agency, said: “Twenty years ago, the world was shocked by the terrible atrocities in Darfur. We fear a similar dynamic might be developing.”
The dire situation is not yet a full repeat of the early 2000s, when the scorched-earth tactics of Arab militiamen caused the International Criminal Court to file charges of genocide against Sudanese leaders, including the former president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was deposed in 2019.
This time, diplomats and analysts say, the ethnic violence is more a byproduct of the national battle between forces loyal to the army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and General Hamdan, rather than a coordinated campaign of slaughter.
The R.S.F. wants to present itself as a responsible group that could one day govern Sudan. In an emailed response to questions, it blamed Sudan’s army for the recent deaths in El Geneina, accusing it of shelling civilian neighborhoods. A formal investigation of possible abuses is underway, the group said.
But promises of transparency from a paramilitary group that grew out of the feared militias known as the Janjaweed that terrorized Darfur in the 2000s are viewed with wide skepticism. In private, R.S.F. officials conceded that undisciplined fighters have carried out abuses, diplomats say. And in July, the International Criminal Court opened a new investigation into possible war crimes in Darfur.
Image
Mohamed Hamdan, wearing a military uniform, speaks into a microphone while standing in a crowd of fighters holding long guns and wearing head scarves.
A video posted on social media by the Rapid Support Forces in July purporting to show Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, the forces’ commander, addressing fighters at an undisclosed location.Credit...via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Still, the dynamic could quickly change if other armed groups in Darfur, currently sitting on the fence, decide to join the fray.
After months of grinding battle in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, where fighting first erupted in April, the Rapid Support Forces have turned their focus back to Darfur, the region where most of the group’s fighters are originally from. It captured in quick succession Nyala, Sudan’s second-largest city, Zalingei in Central Darfur and El Geneina.
Now, battle rages in El Fasher, the last stronghold of the army in Darfur. If that falls, experts say, most of Sudan west of the Nile will be in R.S.F. hands.
“El Fasher is the last big domino yet to fall,” said Alan Boswell, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.
The battle’s outcome depends in part on decisions taken by Minni Minnawi, the regional governor of Darfur, whose armed forces are concentrated around El Fasher. So far, they have avoided taking sides in the war. And although Mr. Minnawi is a longtime R.S.F. rival, many doubt that his fighters have the strength to confront the paramilitary group now.
“Fighting looks like a bad proposition for them,” Mr. Boswell said.
Image
Fighters sit atop small military vehicles traveling down a road near electrical poles and a white truck parked on the other side.
A military convoy accompanying the regional governor of Darfur, Minni Minawi, in August on the way to Port Sudan, which is held by the Sudanese military and is now the center of government.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The changes highlight how much ground Sudan’s military, long seen as the backbone of the state, has lost in this war. Unable to dislodge the R.S.F. from Khartoum, the military has been forced to shift most government functions to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, in the country’s far east. Aid groups and U.N. missions are also working from there.
International efforts to broker a cease-fire, led by the United States and Saudi Arabia, have failed to find compromise. The latest talks last week in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, produced little. And the humanitarian cost is soaring.
So far, at least 10,400 people have died, mostly in Khartoum and Darfur, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, although Sudanese health workers say the real toll is most likely much higher.
Nearly five million people — about one-tenth of Sudan’s population — have been internally displaced, and an additional 1.2 million have fled into neighboring countries, mostly Chad, South Sudan and Egypt.
Half of Sudan’s 46 million people need aid to survive, the United Nations says.
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Abdel Fattah al-Burhan walking on an airport tarmac with other military figures, and a mostly white plane is behind them.
Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan arriving with officials and guards at the military airport in Port Sudan in August.Credit...Ibrahim Mohammed Ishak/Reuters
A handful of aid groups have trickled back into West Darfur in recent months after reaching agreements with the R.S.F. and Arab militias. Their employees describe massacres of civilians, dozens of reported rapes, orphaned children and refugee-filled schools.
Will Carter, the Sudan director of the Norwegian Refugee Council, blamed the world for turning its back on Sudan. “The sheer number of deaths, the scale of the devastation in Darfur and the lack of attention show how the international system is failing right in front of our eyes,” he said.
Ali Salam, an aid coordinator with the Sudanese American Physicians Association, said he had seen “unbelievable” things during a recent visit to refugee camps in Chad near the Sudanese border. One woman arrived at a camp with a dead child strapped to her back, unaware that the child had died along the way, he said.
“People are dying like insects in Darfur,” he said.
As events in the Middle East preoccupy the United States, for years a major influence in Sudan, there is even less scrutiny of foreign powers accused of fueling Sudan’s war, like the United Arab Emirates. An investigation showed the Emiratis are smuggling arms to General Hamdan from a base in Chad, or Egypt, which backs Sudan’s military.
Two decades ago, the cause of peace in Sudan was embraced by Western celebrities and activists who held marches in Washington under the “Save Darfur” banner. This time, many in Sudan feel that the world has turned its back on them.
“How many more lives will it take for the world to step in, for people to care?” said Omnia Mustafa, a 21-year-old Sudanese woman (not related to Dr. Mustafa) who appealed on TikTok this week for outsiders to take notice of her country’s plight.
“I’m sick and tired of our suffering falling into deaf ears,” she said. “We are also people, like everyone else.”
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Women and children in a large hangar-type building with yellow walls and bedding laid out on the floor.
A camp for the internally displaced in al-Suwar, Sudan, in June.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3
U.S. Vetoes Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire Resolution at U.N. Security Council
The veto came amid a warning that “civil order is breaking down” in Gaza, and a day after the Biden administration warned that Israel’s military had not done enough to reduce harm to civilians.
Displaced Palestinians set up a makeshift camp in the Al-Muwasi area of the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday.Credit...Fatima Shbair/Associated Press
The United States on Friday vetoed a United Nations resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has launched hundreds of strikes, relief efforts were faltering and people were growing so desperate for basic necessities that some were stoning and raiding aid convoys.
The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, and most members of the Security Council had backed the measure, saying that the humanitarian catastrophe in the coastal enclave where 2.2 million Palestinians live could threaten world stability.
But the United States, which is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, blocked the resolution, arguing that Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas attacks. The vote was 13 to 1, with Britain abstaining and some U.S. allies like France voting for a cease-fire.
Robert A. Wood, who was representing the United States on the Council, said after the veto that the resolution for an unconditional and immediate cease-fire “was not only unrealistic, but dangerous — it would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on Oct. 7.”
The failed resolution came as the United Nations reported that it was struggling to deliver essential goods like food, medicine and cooking gas to desperate civilians who have packed into shelters and tent cities after two months of war.
“Civil order is breaking down,” Thomas White, the Gaza director of the United Nations relief agency for Palestinians, wrote Friday on social media. He added: “Some aid convoys are being looted and UN vehicles stoned. Society is on the brink of full-blown collapse.”
Mr. White spoke a day after the Biden administration warned that the Israeli military had not done enough to reduce harm to civilians in Gaza.
“It is imperative — it remains imperative — that Israel put a premium on civilian protection,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told reporters in Washington on Thursday. “And there does remain a gap between exactly what I said when I was there, the intent to protect civilians, and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground.”
Image
A crowd of men carry a man laying on a stretcher; he is rubbing his eyes with blackened fingers.
Rescuers pulled a wounded person from the rubble of a destroyed house in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on Friday.Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
Fighting has been raging in southern Gaza’s largest city, Khan Younis, and in northern Gaza, where Israeli troops have focused on the Shajaiye neighborhood of Gaza City, and Jabaliya, a densely populated neighborhood north of the city, where they say Hamas operatives continue to hide.
An Israeli government spokesman, Eylon Levy, said that Israel had been taking steps to keep civilians safe “despite attempts by their own leaders to deliberately sacrifice them as human shields.”
“That’s why we published a very detailed map to help civilians evacuate; it’s why we surrendered the element of surprise by urging the evacuation of areas before moving in,” Mr. Levy said. He added, “We believe we are setting the highest possible standard for the minimization of civilian casualties in counterterrorism operations in urban areas.”
Image
A military vehicle plows through a pile of dirt in a field. A helmeted soldier’s head is poking out the top.
An Israeli military vehicle near the Israel-Gaza border on Friday. The military said it had struck hundreds of targets over the previous 24 hours and had pushed deeper into Gaza. Credit...Amir Cohen/Reuters
Image
A large camp with many buses and taxis visible on a street. In the distance, a plume of smoke rises into the sky.
Palestinians who fled the Gazan city of Khan Younis set up camp in Rafah.Credit...Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But Israel has been facing pressure from the United Nations to stop the fighting. On Wednesday, for the first time in his seven-year tenure at the helm of the U.N., Mr. Guterres invoked Article 99, a rarely used rule that allows the secretary general to bring to the Security Council’s attention any matter that “may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”
//Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
//Updated
//Dec. 9, 2023, 7:24 a.m. ET2 hours ago
//2 hours ago
//Israel strikes targets across the Gaza Strip.
//The Palestinian Authority’s leader assails the U.S. veto of a U.N. cease-fire resolution.
Israeli forces made a failed attempt to rescue hostages in Gaza, Israel and Hamas say.
Mr. Guterres argued that it was necessary because of the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza and because related conflicts were flaring in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
In an earlier address to the Council, he said: “There is a high risk of the total collapse of the humanitarian support system in Gaza, which would have devastating consequences. I fear the consequences could be devastating for the security of the entire region.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, told the Council that approving the resolution — which was submitted by the United Arab Emirates — would only allow Hamas to regroup and plan more attacks on the Jewish state. He said Israel would “continue with its mission, the elimination of Hamas’s terror capability and the return of all of the hostages.”
Mohamed Abushahab, the U.A.E.’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said after the vote, “Regrettably, and in the face of untold misery, this Council is unable to demand a humanitarian cease-fire.” He added, “Against the backdrop of the secretary general’s grave warnings, the appeals by humanitarian actors, the world’s public opinion — this Council grows isolated. It appears untethered from its own founding document.”
Before the veto, Mr. Wood said the United States had tried to negotiate changes to the agreement, but “nearly all of our recommendations were ignored,” including adding a condemnation of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and an endorsement of Israel’s right to self-defense.
Israel launched its offensive after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel in October, killing 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials. Since then, more than 15,000 people in Gaza have been killed, according to health officials in the territory.
The Israeli military said on Friday that it had struck hundreds of targets over the previous 24 hours and had pushed deeper into Gaza. The military said the air force had attacked “numerous terrorists” in a two-hour round of strikes in Khan Younis, which has become a focus of the fighting over the last week.
In a video statement, Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus, who is commanding Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis, said that troops were “moving from tunnel to tunnel, house to house.”
“The enemy is jumping out at us from the orchards, from tunnels,” General Goldfus said, as gunfire crackled in the background.
Israel has asked the U.S. State Department to approve an order for 45,000 rounds of ammunition for the types of tanks operating in Gaza, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the request. The value of the order is more than $500 million, they said.
Some U.S. lawmakers are likely to raise sharp questions about the order once the State Department submits it to Congress for review. But one official said the department was considering invoking an emergency provision in an arms export act to bypass congressional review.
An Israeli military roundup of hundreds of Palestinian men in Gaza has set off outrage after photos and video of men tied up outdoors and stripped to their underwear spread widely on social media on Thursday. Israeli officials said the men had been detained in Jabaliya and Shajaiye and stripped to ensure they were not carrying explosives.
“We’re talking about military-age men who were discovered in areas that civilians were supposed to have evacuated weeks ago,” Mr. Levy said. “Those individuals will be questioned, and we will work out who indeed was a Hamas terrorist and who is not.”
Critics said that the mass detentions and humiliating treatment could violate the laws of war.
Brian Finucane, an analyst at the International Crisis Group and a former legal adviser to the State Department, said that international law set “a very high bar” for an occupying power to detain noncombatants and that “the base line is going to be humane treatment.”
“That prohibits outrages on personal dignity and humiliating and degrading treatment,” he said.
Image
A woman with her face covered in dust is escorted by a man and a woman with distraught expressions on their faces, in a hallway.
A wounded Palestinian arriving at a hospital in Khan Younis on Friday.Credit...Mohammed Dahman/Associated Press
In southern Gaza, where some limited relief supplies have been delivered through a border crossing with Egypt, more than eight out of 10 households have taken extreme measures to cope with food shortages, the World Food Program said this week. In northern Gaza, 97 percent of households were doing the same, the survey found.
Israel said on Thursday it would allow a “minimal” supply of additional fuel into Gaza “to prevent a humanitarian collapse and the outbreak of epidemics,” and would open a second border crossing for aid deliveries.
Reporting was contributed by Sarah Hurtes, Liam Stack, Edward Wong, Yara Bayoumy, Raja Abdulrahim, Arijeta Lajka, Christiaan Triebert and Chevaz Clarke.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/worl ... a-aid.html
Displaced Palestinians set up a makeshift camp in the Al-Muwasi area of the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday.Credit...Fatima Shbair/Associated Press
The United States on Friday vetoed a United Nations resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has launched hundreds of strikes, relief efforts were faltering and people were growing so desperate for basic necessities that some were stoning and raiding aid convoys.
The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, and most members of the Security Council had backed the measure, saying that the humanitarian catastrophe in the coastal enclave where 2.2 million Palestinians live could threaten world stability.
But the United States, which is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, blocked the resolution, arguing that Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas attacks. The vote was 13 to 1, with Britain abstaining and some U.S. allies like France voting for a cease-fire.
Robert A. Wood, who was representing the United States on the Council, said after the veto that the resolution for an unconditional and immediate cease-fire “was not only unrealistic, but dangerous — it would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on Oct. 7.”
The failed resolution came as the United Nations reported that it was struggling to deliver essential goods like food, medicine and cooking gas to desperate civilians who have packed into shelters and tent cities after two months of war.
“Civil order is breaking down,” Thomas White, the Gaza director of the United Nations relief agency for Palestinians, wrote Friday on social media. He added: “Some aid convoys are being looted and UN vehicles stoned. Society is on the brink of full-blown collapse.”
Mr. White spoke a day after the Biden administration warned that the Israeli military had not done enough to reduce harm to civilians in Gaza.
“It is imperative — it remains imperative — that Israel put a premium on civilian protection,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told reporters in Washington on Thursday. “And there does remain a gap between exactly what I said when I was there, the intent to protect civilians, and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground.”
Image
A crowd of men carry a man laying on a stretcher; he is rubbing his eyes with blackened fingers.
Rescuers pulled a wounded person from the rubble of a destroyed house in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on Friday.Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
Fighting has been raging in southern Gaza’s largest city, Khan Younis, and in northern Gaza, where Israeli troops have focused on the Shajaiye neighborhood of Gaza City, and Jabaliya, a densely populated neighborhood north of the city, where they say Hamas operatives continue to hide.
An Israeli government spokesman, Eylon Levy, said that Israel had been taking steps to keep civilians safe “despite attempts by their own leaders to deliberately sacrifice them as human shields.”
“That’s why we published a very detailed map to help civilians evacuate; it’s why we surrendered the element of surprise by urging the evacuation of areas before moving in,” Mr. Levy said. He added, “We believe we are setting the highest possible standard for the minimization of civilian casualties in counterterrorism operations in urban areas.”
Image
A military vehicle plows through a pile of dirt in a field. A helmeted soldier’s head is poking out the top.
An Israeli military vehicle near the Israel-Gaza border on Friday. The military said it had struck hundreds of targets over the previous 24 hours and had pushed deeper into Gaza. Credit...Amir Cohen/Reuters
Image
A large camp with many buses and taxis visible on a street. In the distance, a plume of smoke rises into the sky.
Palestinians who fled the Gazan city of Khan Younis set up camp in Rafah.Credit...Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But Israel has been facing pressure from the United Nations to stop the fighting. On Wednesday, for the first time in his seven-year tenure at the helm of the U.N., Mr. Guterres invoked Article 99, a rarely used rule that allows the secretary general to bring to the Security Council’s attention any matter that “may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”
//Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
//Updated
//Dec. 9, 2023, 7:24 a.m. ET2 hours ago
//2 hours ago
//Israel strikes targets across the Gaza Strip.
//The Palestinian Authority’s leader assails the U.S. veto of a U.N. cease-fire resolution.
Israeli forces made a failed attempt to rescue hostages in Gaza, Israel and Hamas say.
Mr. Guterres argued that it was necessary because of the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza and because related conflicts were flaring in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
In an earlier address to the Council, he said: “There is a high risk of the total collapse of the humanitarian support system in Gaza, which would have devastating consequences. I fear the consequences could be devastating for the security of the entire region.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, told the Council that approving the resolution — which was submitted by the United Arab Emirates — would only allow Hamas to regroup and plan more attacks on the Jewish state. He said Israel would “continue with its mission, the elimination of Hamas’s terror capability and the return of all of the hostages.”
Mohamed Abushahab, the U.A.E.’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said after the vote, “Regrettably, and in the face of untold misery, this Council is unable to demand a humanitarian cease-fire.” He added, “Against the backdrop of the secretary general’s grave warnings, the appeals by humanitarian actors, the world’s public opinion — this Council grows isolated. It appears untethered from its own founding document.”
Before the veto, Mr. Wood said the United States had tried to negotiate changes to the agreement, but “nearly all of our recommendations were ignored,” including adding a condemnation of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and an endorsement of Israel’s right to self-defense.
Israel launched its offensive after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel in October, killing 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials. Since then, more than 15,000 people in Gaza have been killed, according to health officials in the territory.
The Israeli military said on Friday that it had struck hundreds of targets over the previous 24 hours and had pushed deeper into Gaza. The military said the air force had attacked “numerous terrorists” in a two-hour round of strikes in Khan Younis, which has become a focus of the fighting over the last week.
In a video statement, Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus, who is commanding Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis, said that troops were “moving from tunnel to tunnel, house to house.”
“The enemy is jumping out at us from the orchards, from tunnels,” General Goldfus said, as gunfire crackled in the background.
Israel has asked the U.S. State Department to approve an order for 45,000 rounds of ammunition for the types of tanks operating in Gaza, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the request. The value of the order is more than $500 million, they said.
Some U.S. lawmakers are likely to raise sharp questions about the order once the State Department submits it to Congress for review. But one official said the department was considering invoking an emergency provision in an arms export act to bypass congressional review.
An Israeli military roundup of hundreds of Palestinian men in Gaza has set off outrage after photos and video of men tied up outdoors and stripped to their underwear spread widely on social media on Thursday. Israeli officials said the men had been detained in Jabaliya and Shajaiye and stripped to ensure they were not carrying explosives.
“We’re talking about military-age men who were discovered in areas that civilians were supposed to have evacuated weeks ago,” Mr. Levy said. “Those individuals will be questioned, and we will work out who indeed was a Hamas terrorist and who is not.”
Critics said that the mass detentions and humiliating treatment could violate the laws of war.
Brian Finucane, an analyst at the International Crisis Group and a former legal adviser to the State Department, said that international law set “a very high bar” for an occupying power to detain noncombatants and that “the base line is going to be humane treatment.”
“That prohibits outrages on personal dignity and humiliating and degrading treatment,” he said.
Image
A woman with her face covered in dust is escorted by a man and a woman with distraught expressions on their faces, in a hallway.
A wounded Palestinian arriving at a hospital in Khan Younis on Friday.Credit...Mohammed Dahman/Associated Press
In southern Gaza, where some limited relief supplies have been delivered through a border crossing with Egypt, more than eight out of 10 households have taken extreme measures to cope with food shortages, the World Food Program said this week. In northern Gaza, 97 percent of households were doing the same, the survey found.
Israel said on Thursday it would allow a “minimal” supply of additional fuel into Gaza “to prevent a humanitarian collapse and the outbreak of epidemics,” and would open a second border crossing for aid deliveries.
Reporting was contributed by Sarah Hurtes, Liam Stack, Edward Wong, Yara Bayoumy, Raja Abdulrahim, Arijeta Lajka, Christiaan Triebert and Chevaz Clarke.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/worl ... a-aid.html
Atrocities Mount in Sudan as War Spirals, U.N. Says
Rape, killing, torture: A stark report offers new evidence of horrific abuses carried out by Sudan’s military and its enemy, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
Refugees from the fighting in Sudan line up to board a barge in Renk, South Sudan. A United Nations report documents horrors by both warring sides. Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
Bombs that struck houses, markets and bus stations across Sudan, often killing dozens of civilians at once. Ethnic rampages, accompanied by rape and looting, that killed thousands in the western region of Darfur.
And a video clip, verified by United Nations officials, that shows Sudanese soldiers parading through the streets of a major city, triumphantly brandishing the decapitated heads of students who were killed on the basis of their ethnicity.
The horrors of Sudan’s spiraling civil war are laid out in graphic detail in a new United Nations report that draws on satellite imagery, photos, videos and interviews with over 300 victims and witnesses, to present the stark human toll from 10 months of fighting.
Many probable war crimes have occurred as part of the grinding battle for control of Sudan, one of the largest countries in Africa, which started with clashes between the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, the report by the U.N.’s human rights body found.
The fight started as a power struggle between the leaders of the military, which dominated Sudan for decades, and the R.S.F., which comes mainly from Darfur. But it quickly escalated into a nationwide conflict with catastrophic consequences for Sudan’s 46 million people.
Both sides have committed indiscriminate attacks on civilians. Women and children have been raped or gang raped. Recruitment of child soldiers is common.
Foreign powers, including the United Arab Emirates and Iran, have stepped in to back one side or the other, sending sophisticated weapons, including armed drones, to the battlefield, which accelerated the tempo of fighting and increased the already high risks to civilians. American- and Saudi-led diplomatic efforts to broker even a modest cease-fire have come to nothing.
And the brutality has become more open. The students who were decapitated in the city of El-Obeid, in central Sudan, were apparently butchered on the assumption that they backed the Rapid Support Forces, a Nairobi-based spokesman for the U. N. human rights office, Seif Manango, told reporters.
Sudan’s military said that it was investigating the video, denouncing its content as “shocking,” and promising to bring any perpetrators to account.
Despite the growing evidence of atrocities — and warnings from aid groups that parts of Sudan are heading toward famine — the international focus on conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine has largely eclipsed the crisis in Sudan.
Image
A man measures the thin upper arm of a small child with a tape measure.
A health worker measures the circumference of a Sudanese child’s arm at the clinic of a Transit Centre for refugees in Renk, South Sudan, in February.Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A United Nations appeal for $2.7 billion in humanitarian funding for Sudan has yielded less than 4 percent of those funds — $97 million — forcing the U.N. to dig into its emergency reserve to meet the most urgent food and shelter needs.
Sudan’s war has forced eight million people from their homes, creating one of the world’s largest displacement crises. Nearly 1.5 million refugees have fled into neighboring countries, especially South Sudan, Chad and Egypt. About 80 percent of hospitals in conflict-affected areas have closed, the World Health Organization said.
Yet even as the weak die of starvation, attacks on aid convoys have obstructed aid deliveries, and impunity reigns. Despite accounts of “death, suffering and despair” since the war in Sudan began, there is “no end in sight” to the abuses of civilians, the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Turk, said in a statement.
The U.N. report found that both sides have detained civilians, including women and children, often torturing those they suspected of collaborating with their enemies. But it said the great majority of sexual assaults appeared to have been carried out by the Rapid Support Forces and affiliated militias, and cited one incident in which a victim was detained and gang raped over 35 days by R.S.F. forces.
The report said that other victims were killed trying to prevent the fighters from assaulting their family members, and that members of ethnic African groups were especially targeted by R.S.F.-linked fighters from ethnic Arab backgrounds.
At least 14,600 people have been killed in the conflict, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nonprofit that collects data about conflicts, although the actual toll is almost certainly much higher because of the difficulty of collecting data in a war zone. In a report submitted to the U.N. Security Council last month, obtained by The Times, U.N. investigators estimated that as many as 15,000 people were killed during just one assault by the R.S.F. and allied forces on the Darfuri city of Geneina in November.
In response to the R.S.F. advance, the Sudanese military has dropped crude barrel bombs on homes and camps in the Darfur and Kordofan regions, frequently killing dozens of civilians at once.
The evidence of widespread atrocities comes as the course of the war has taken several dramatic turns in recent months, amid growing evidence of foreign interference.
Image
Refugees who have fled the war in Sudan carry their belongings as they board a boat.
Refugees from the war in Sudan carry their belongings while boarding a boat in Renk, South Sudan. Both sides have committed indiscriminate attacks on civilians, a United Nations report found. Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Emirates have been covertly supplying the Rapid Support Forces with armed drones, surface-to-air missiles and other sophisticated weapons since last summer, according to United Nations investigators and diplomats, helping the Sudanese group capture a string of major cities in Darfur, as well as the key city of Wad Madani, south of Khartoum, in December.
Shock at the fall of Wad Madani prompted the Sudanese military to go back on the offensive, launching a major drive to recapture from the R.S.F. parts of Omdurman, a city across the Nile from Khartoum.
In that battle, the army has reclaimed some territory, one of its first major victories since the war started, although it has had to turn to Iran to obtain armed drones to boost its campaign — a potential source of tension with the military’s other backer, Egypt, whose military support appears to have waned in recent months.
The army effort in Omdurman was also boosted by the arrival of Darfuri rebel groups that once fought Sudan’s army but now are allied with the force in fighting against the R.S.F., their mutual enemy.
Space for peace talks appears to be shrinking. American- and Saudi-led efforts to broker even a modest cease-fire through talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah proved futile.
The American ambassador to Sudan, John Godfrey, who helped lead those talks, said on Friday that he was stepping down. No replacement has been announced amid reports that the State Department will soon name a special envoy for Sudan.
On Friday, a State Department spokesman condemned a decision by the Sudanese military to prohibit relief aid from crossing into R.S.F.-controlled territory from Chad, as well as the R.S.F. looting of aid deliveries and harassment of humanitarian workers.
The leader of the R.S.F., Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, appeared to be taking a victory lap in late December and early January, when he toured six African nations aboard an Emirati jet, shaking hands with powerful leaders, including South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and Kenya’s President William Ruto.
In recent weeks, representatives from the warring parties have held back-channel talks in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain, with support from the Emirates and Egypt, according to diplomats and news reports. But those talks have yielded little so far.
In February a senior Sudanese general, Shams al-Din Kabbashi, suggested that peace efforts had reached an impasse.
While Sudan’s military “carries an olive branch next to the gun,” it would not engage in political talks until “the military file is closed,” he said in a speech. “We will fight, we will fight, we will fight.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/24/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Refugees from the fighting in Sudan line up to board a barge in Renk, South Sudan. A United Nations report documents horrors by both warring sides. Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
Bombs that struck houses, markets and bus stations across Sudan, often killing dozens of civilians at once. Ethnic rampages, accompanied by rape and looting, that killed thousands in the western region of Darfur.
And a video clip, verified by United Nations officials, that shows Sudanese soldiers parading through the streets of a major city, triumphantly brandishing the decapitated heads of students who were killed on the basis of their ethnicity.
The horrors of Sudan’s spiraling civil war are laid out in graphic detail in a new United Nations report that draws on satellite imagery, photos, videos and interviews with over 300 victims and witnesses, to present the stark human toll from 10 months of fighting.
Many probable war crimes have occurred as part of the grinding battle for control of Sudan, one of the largest countries in Africa, which started with clashes between the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April 2023, the report by the U.N.’s human rights body found.
The fight started as a power struggle between the leaders of the military, which dominated Sudan for decades, and the R.S.F., which comes mainly from Darfur. But it quickly escalated into a nationwide conflict with catastrophic consequences for Sudan’s 46 million people.
Both sides have committed indiscriminate attacks on civilians. Women and children have been raped or gang raped. Recruitment of child soldiers is common.
Foreign powers, including the United Arab Emirates and Iran, have stepped in to back one side or the other, sending sophisticated weapons, including armed drones, to the battlefield, which accelerated the tempo of fighting and increased the already high risks to civilians. American- and Saudi-led diplomatic efforts to broker even a modest cease-fire have come to nothing.
And the brutality has become more open. The students who were decapitated in the city of El-Obeid, in central Sudan, were apparently butchered on the assumption that they backed the Rapid Support Forces, a Nairobi-based spokesman for the U. N. human rights office, Seif Manango, told reporters.
Sudan’s military said that it was investigating the video, denouncing its content as “shocking,” and promising to bring any perpetrators to account.
Despite the growing evidence of atrocities — and warnings from aid groups that parts of Sudan are heading toward famine — the international focus on conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine has largely eclipsed the crisis in Sudan.
Image
A man measures the thin upper arm of a small child with a tape measure.
A health worker measures the circumference of a Sudanese child’s arm at the clinic of a Transit Centre for refugees in Renk, South Sudan, in February.Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A United Nations appeal for $2.7 billion in humanitarian funding for Sudan has yielded less than 4 percent of those funds — $97 million — forcing the U.N. to dig into its emergency reserve to meet the most urgent food and shelter needs.
Sudan’s war has forced eight million people from their homes, creating one of the world’s largest displacement crises. Nearly 1.5 million refugees have fled into neighboring countries, especially South Sudan, Chad and Egypt. About 80 percent of hospitals in conflict-affected areas have closed, the World Health Organization said.
Yet even as the weak die of starvation, attacks on aid convoys have obstructed aid deliveries, and impunity reigns. Despite accounts of “death, suffering and despair” since the war in Sudan began, there is “no end in sight” to the abuses of civilians, the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Turk, said in a statement.
The U.N. report found that both sides have detained civilians, including women and children, often torturing those they suspected of collaborating with their enemies. But it said the great majority of sexual assaults appeared to have been carried out by the Rapid Support Forces and affiliated militias, and cited one incident in which a victim was detained and gang raped over 35 days by R.S.F. forces.
The report said that other victims were killed trying to prevent the fighters from assaulting their family members, and that members of ethnic African groups were especially targeted by R.S.F.-linked fighters from ethnic Arab backgrounds.
At least 14,600 people have been killed in the conflict, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nonprofit that collects data about conflicts, although the actual toll is almost certainly much higher because of the difficulty of collecting data in a war zone. In a report submitted to the U.N. Security Council last month, obtained by The Times, U.N. investigators estimated that as many as 15,000 people were killed during just one assault by the R.S.F. and allied forces on the Darfuri city of Geneina in November.
In response to the R.S.F. advance, the Sudanese military has dropped crude barrel bombs on homes and camps in the Darfur and Kordofan regions, frequently killing dozens of civilians at once.
The evidence of widespread atrocities comes as the course of the war has taken several dramatic turns in recent months, amid growing evidence of foreign interference.
Image
Refugees who have fled the war in Sudan carry their belongings as they board a boat.
Refugees from the war in Sudan carry their belongings while boarding a boat in Renk, South Sudan. Both sides have committed indiscriminate attacks on civilians, a United Nations report found. Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Emirates have been covertly supplying the Rapid Support Forces with armed drones, surface-to-air missiles and other sophisticated weapons since last summer, according to United Nations investigators and diplomats, helping the Sudanese group capture a string of major cities in Darfur, as well as the key city of Wad Madani, south of Khartoum, in December.
Shock at the fall of Wad Madani prompted the Sudanese military to go back on the offensive, launching a major drive to recapture from the R.S.F. parts of Omdurman, a city across the Nile from Khartoum.
In that battle, the army has reclaimed some territory, one of its first major victories since the war started, although it has had to turn to Iran to obtain armed drones to boost its campaign — a potential source of tension with the military’s other backer, Egypt, whose military support appears to have waned in recent months.
The army effort in Omdurman was also boosted by the arrival of Darfuri rebel groups that once fought Sudan’s army but now are allied with the force in fighting against the R.S.F., their mutual enemy.
Space for peace talks appears to be shrinking. American- and Saudi-led efforts to broker even a modest cease-fire through talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah proved futile.
The American ambassador to Sudan, John Godfrey, who helped lead those talks, said on Friday that he was stepping down. No replacement has been announced amid reports that the State Department will soon name a special envoy for Sudan.
On Friday, a State Department spokesman condemned a decision by the Sudanese military to prohibit relief aid from crossing into R.S.F.-controlled territory from Chad, as well as the R.S.F. looting of aid deliveries and harassment of humanitarian workers.
The leader of the R.S.F., Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, appeared to be taking a victory lap in late December and early January, when he toured six African nations aboard an Emirati jet, shaking hands with powerful leaders, including South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and Kenya’s President William Ruto.
In recent weeks, representatives from the warring parties have held back-channel talks in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain, with support from the Emirates and Egypt, according to diplomats and news reports. But those talks have yielded little so far.
In February a senior Sudanese general, Shams al-Din Kabbashi, suggested that peace efforts had reached an impasse.
While Sudan’s military “carries an olive branch next to the gun,” it would not engage in political talks until “the military file is closed,” he said in a speech. “We will fight, we will fight, we will fight.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/24/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Lives Ended in Gaza
Since the war started, more than 30,000 people have been killed during Israel’s bombardment and invasion. Here are some of their stories.
THEY SERVED CAPPUCCINOS, repaired cars and acted onstage. They raised children and took care of older parents. They treated wounds, made pizza and put too much sugar in their tea. They loved living in Gaza or sought to leave it behind.
They represent a fraction of the more than 30,000 people the local authorities say have been killed in Gaza in four and a half months of war. Their stories offer a snapshot of the vast human loss — one in every 73 of Gaza’s 2.2 million people.
More than two-thirds of the total deaths were women and children, the local authorities say. Often, they were killed with their families in Israeli airstrikes. Many thousands were fighters for Hamas, according to Israel, which says it is trying to eliminate the group that led the Oct. 7 attacks while limiting civilian casualties.
Hamas ruled Gaza and ran a covert military organization, the identity of its fighters unclear, even to other Gazans. Some residents supported it, some opposed it, everyone had to live with it. After decades of conflict, hatred of Israel was common, and many Gazans, including some of those below, cheered the fighters who attacked Israel.
Here are some of the people who have been killed in Gaza, as recalled by friends and relatives and documented in social media posts, news articles and other sources.
GAZA IS a youthful place, with nearly half of the population under 18, according to UNICEF. Gaza’s health authorities say that more than 13,000 children have been killed in the war.
She and her twin sister had names that rhymed. She loved to adorn her outfits with colorful accessories and relished the attention she and her sister received from neighbors. She was killed in a strike on her family’s building. Her sister, Marah, survived, as did their father and mother, who gave birth to a third daughter a few weeks later. They named her Farah.
Farah Alkhatib, 12
The older sister loved Kinder chocolate, Pringles and strawberry juice. The younger loved to play with a plastic jeep embellished with a duck.
Siwar and Selena al-Raiss, 3 years and 21 months
Her father bought her a violin, and she loved it, taking lessons at a Palestinian music school. She dreamed of becoming a star.
Lubna Elian, 14
He was close with his father and tagged along with his mother to the gym where she worked as a trainer. She called him “medallion,” because he was always hanging on his parents. He wanted to be a doctor, like his father.
Yousef Abu Moussa, 6
She was a top student who liked to draw nature scenes, rollerblade and jump on her trampoline. During the war, she played teacher to her siblings and cousins to distract them. She was killed in a strike that destroyed her family’s home. Her sister, Leen, 8, died four days later, trapped in the rubble.
Nada Abdulhadi, 10
She was the center of attention. Her mother, Maram, loved to dress her up for pictures. She was killed in October. Her mother was killed in a separate strike 11 days later.
Youmna Shaqalih, 4 months
GAZA’S ISOLATION and its school system gave it an uncommon mix: an educated population with high poverty and unemployment rates. Many Gazans with strong credentials struggled to find suitable employment.
He studied engineering in Gaza and Spain before trying unsuccessfully to settle in Norway, where he worked in an Italian restaurant. Back in Gaza, with engineering jobs scarce, he opened an eatery, Italiano, that served pizza, calzones, salads and shawarma. It was so successful that in 2021 it moved into a shiny new location, with dozens of employees, three floors and rooms for private events. He was killed with his parents and two brothers in a strike on the building. His wife and two children, 3 and 6, survived.
Abdulrahman Abuamara, 39
In the two years before the war, she earned a university degree in software engineering, got married and became pregnant with her first child. She was killed alongside her husband before the baby was born.
Ghadeer Mohammed Mansour, 24
The twins did not find work related to their university degrees in English literature, so they started a business importing clothes, shoes and accessories to resell from their family’s apartment, often delivering orders themselves. They pumped iron at Oxygen Gym and posted their workouts on Instagram.
Salah and Khaled Jadallah, 27
The twins’ sister, killed in the same strike as her brothers and her father, worked as a medical laboratory analyst at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza and at a private lab, which featured her smile in its advertisements to encourage patients to come in for tests. She cherished her financial independence and dreamed of earning a master’s degree.
Doaa Jadallah, 29
He did translation for a human rights group and worked for a think tank focused on improving Palestinians’ lives. Shortly before the war, he received a scholarship for a master’s degree in international relations in Australia. He hoped to become a diplomat. He was killed alongside 20 family members in a strike that destroyed his family’s home.
Mahmoud Alnaouq, 25
She worked in graphic design to help support her family while studying multimedia at a Gaza university. She hoped to teach there one day.
Jannat Iyad Abu Zbeada, 21
He had a degree in business administration but took construction jobs he hated and helped his family fish off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast. He loved soccer and supported F.C. Barcelona. His life’s longest trip took about an hour, a drive to a friend’s wedding elsewhere in Gaza.
Rami Abu Reyaleh, 32
He tried to start a new life outside Gaza, spending time in Egypt, Turkey, Bolivia and Argentina and crossing the dangerous Darién Gap in Panama to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. He claimed political asylum, telling the U.S. authorities that he had been a member of Hamas’s military wing for a few years before fleeing Gaza to escape the group. He was denied asylum and returned to Gaza before the war. He chipped in at his family’s furniture business and considered getting married. “I wanted to get out, I swear to God, because I don’t bet on Gaza,” he wrote on Facebook as the war raged. “But unfortunately I couldn’t get out and it was my shitty fate that I am living through a third war on this cursed land.”
Motaz Alhelou, 31
GAZA HAS BEEN under a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt since Hamas seized control in 2007. The blockade has shaped nearly every aspect of life, limiting the movement of goods in and out of the territory and making it difficult, if not impossible, for many Gazans to leave. In that period, there have also been several wars and deadly clashes with Israel.
She raised five children — four boys and a girl — who gave her 15 grandchildren. She was set to leave Gaza for the first time, to visit Turkey with her husband to see two of their adult sons and their families. She had packed several suitcases with traditional Palestinian foods: olive oil, a spice mix called za’atar and local greens used to make stew. But the war broke out three days before the trip. She never left.
Faida AlKrunz, 60
His parents were displaced to Gaza from what became Israel in 1948. He never finished high school but worked to support his 12 siblings. His experience gave him an enduring faith in education for his five children, to make sure they had better lives. Later, he mediated family conflicts, often siding with his sons’ wives over his sons. He was killed in October alongside his wife, Faida (above), and nine of their children and grandchildren.
Saud AlKrunz, 61
He was a car mechanic who loved to tinker, including making the gate to his family’s home automatic. He left Gaza only once, for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where his brother lived. He didn’t know how to scan his passport at the airport. It was his first time on an airplane. “Everything was new to him,” his brother said.
Ahmed Abu Shaeera, 39
An Islamic scholar, he preached at Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a holy site cherished by Palestinians. He later served as the minister of religious affairs for the Palestinian Authority and remained committed to Jerusalem. “Palestine has no value without Jerusalem, which is the pearl of Palestine, and Jerusalem has no value without Al Aqsa,” he said.
Youssef Salama, 69
She focused on mental health, a rare but much-needed specialty in Gaza, at the Palestine Red Crescent Society. She worked with people who had been wounded and displaced by Israeli attacks on Gaza as well as with first responders.
Hedaya Hamad, 43
Enchanted by online videos of parkour enthusiasts doing stunts in urban spaces around the world, he tried it himself on Gaza’s beaches. After the 2021 Israel-Gaza conflict, he practiced on the rubble, leaping, landing and rolling on buildings brought down by Israeli airstrikes. “When Salah played, he felt free,” recalled a friend from the Free Gaza Circus Center, where he taught circus arts to children.
Salah Abo Harbed, 23
Born into a refugee family and a member of Gaza’s Greek Orthodox Christian minority, he lived through several wars but still believed that all humans, including the Israelis who occupied and imposed a blockade on Gaza, were created in God’s image. He fondly recalled working as a bank accountant in Israel decades ago and thought it was still possible for the peoples of the Holy Land to live together. He died from an undiagnosed health crisis after clashes prevented him from reaching a hospital.
Jeries Sayegh, 67
MANY RESIDENTS had differing views about what Gaza could be.
She broke barriers in Gaza’s socially conservative society as an actor, playwright and artist. She performed in plays in Gaza and elsewhere and starred in films, including “Sara” in 2014, which addressed the taboo topic of femicide. She taught theater and arts in Gaza and at the ASHTAR theater in Jerusalem. She moved to Egypt after the 2014 Gaza war but returned a few months before the current war. She was killed in her home with three of her five children.
Inas Al-Saqqa, 53
While studying law, he hosted planning meetings and designed banners for protests under the slogan “We Want to Live,” which criticized Hamas’s governance of Gaza and called for better living conditions. But reflecting the complex views many Gazans hold toward Hamas, he lauded “the men of the resistance” on Oct. 7. “Officially, today is the greatest day in our generation’s entire life.”
Sayel Al-Hinnawi, 22
He founded a media production company and worked as a filmmaker and photographer. He served as a camera assistant on Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary “Human Flow” and liked to show Gaza in a positive light, especially with drone footage shot near the sea. He was on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia with his wife and baby daughter when the war broke out, and returned home to document the conflict, posting a video that called the Oct. 7 attackers “Palestinian freedom fighters.”
Roshdi al-Sarraj, 31
She made paintings in bold colors about Palestinian themes, showing mosques and churches side by side and the Old City of Jerusalem, which she was never able to visit. She had four sons, supported her family as an art teacher and was trying to put on her first exhibition.
Heba Zagout, 38
For a decade and a half, he served coffee at Mazaj, an upscale cafe in downtown Gaza City, helping it reopen swiftly after each conflict. “So we meet again,” he told returning customers. “We are all alive.”
Ali al-Sharawi, 45
GAZA is a small place, about six times the size of Manhattan, with a higher population density than Chicago. People forged close ties with large, extended families and their neighbors, often depending on one another.
She was a jokester who took care of her siblings and mother, a widow, with whom she ran a business doing traditional Palestinian embroidery. She had recently completed a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Amneh al-Hana, 38
He was a fitness enthusiast who taught physical education at the American International School in Gaza and volunteered as the coach of the Palestine Athletics Federation. He kept his athletes going despite poor facilities, often buying them training shoes with his own money. He called Oct. 7 “a bright morning for the Palestinians and the resounding fall of Israel” in a post on Facebook.
Belal Abu Samaan, 38
He performed complicated operations on Gaza’s war wounded while running Abu Yousef Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah until his retirement. His wife, also a doctor, died of cancer, and he dealt with loneliness by hosting large meals to bring people into his home.
Dr. Abdallah Shehada, 69
A member of Gaza’s Greek Orthodox Christian minority, he studied aviation engineering in Egypt and worked for airlines in Libya and Uganda before returning to Gaza and managing an aid program for the United Nations. He lived near the sea and swam often when the weather was warm. He sheltered with other Christians in a church during the war and died after clashes prevented him from reaching a hospital after his gallbladder ruptured.
Farajallah Tarazi, 80
She was a physical therapist who was working toward certification to teach yoga to other women. She dreamed of visiting Ireland.
Heba Jourany, 29 (center)
He opened his first marble workshop in his garage and expanded his business to produce marble and granite countertops, sinks and stairs at a factory in Gaza City. He raised pigeons and goats.
Osama Al-Haddad, 50
He worked in factories and on construction sites in Israel before the Gaza blockade and spoke fondly of that time, saying he wished the situation would improve so that he could go back. In the meantime, he loved to sit in the sun, smoke cigarettes and drink tea with so much sugar that it became a family joke.
Riyad Alkhatib, 58
The father of the child violinist, he worked for the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, coordinating rare treatment outside Gaza for patients with serious illnesses. He told a friend, “There is something beautiful in Gaza despite everything that happens.”
Mahmoud Elian, 47
Photos, memories, documents, photos and information about the dead were provided in interviews with relatives, friends and other associates. Those sources include Mohamed Shamiya (friend of Abdulrahman Abuamara), Khaled Abu Shaeera (brother of Ahmed Abu Shaeera), Asmaa Alkaisi (friend of Ali al-Sharawi and Mahmoud Elian), Beirut Hana (cousin of Amneh al-Hana), Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (relative of Farah Alkhatib, nephew of Riyad Alkhatib and nephew of Dr. Abdallah Shehada), Ali Jadallah (brother of Doaa, Salah and Khaled Jadallah), Khalid Balata (cousin of Dua, Salah and Khaled Jadallah), Tarek Masoud (friend of Salah and Khaled Jadallah), Mahmoud AlKrunz (son of Faida and Saud AlKrunz), Ruba Tarazi (daughter of Farajallah Tarazi), Ola Salama (friend of Ghadeer Mohammed Mansour and niece of Youssef Salama), Amal Khayal (teacher of Heba Jourany), Maysaa Ghazi (sister of Heba Zagout), Osama Al-Kahlout (colleague of Hedaya Hamad), Farah Sedo (daughter of Inas Al-Saqqa), Rawaa Iyad (sister of Jannat Iyad Abu Zbeada), Khalil Sayegh (son of Jeries Sayegh), Khitam Attaallah (aunt of Lubna Elian), Ahmed Alnaouq (brother of Mahmoud Alnaouq), Maha Hussaini (work supervisor of Mahmoud Alnaouq), Mahmoud Alhelou (brother of Motaz Alhelou), Ramsey Judah (lawyer of Motaz Alhelou), Said Shoaib (uncle of Nada Abdulhadi), Mohammed Al-Haddad (son of Osama Al-Haddad), Yazan Ahmed (friend of Rami Abu Reyaleh), Shrouq Aila (wife of Roshdi al-Sarraj), Mahmod al-Sarraj (brother of Roshdi al-Sarraj), Mohammad Khader (Gaza Circus member with Salah Abo Harbed), Mohammed Altooli (friend of Sayel Al-Hinnawi), Mohammad al-Raiss (father of Siwar and Selena al-Raiss), Madlian Shaqalih (aunt of Youmna Shaqalih) and Mohammed Abu Moussa (father of Yousef Abu Moussa).
Additional photo source: Reuters (photo of Youssef Salama)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
Since the war started, more than 30,000 people have been killed during Israel’s bombardment and invasion. Here are some of their stories.
THEY SERVED CAPPUCCINOS, repaired cars and acted onstage. They raised children and took care of older parents. They treated wounds, made pizza and put too much sugar in their tea. They loved living in Gaza or sought to leave it behind.
They represent a fraction of the more than 30,000 people the local authorities say have been killed in Gaza in four and a half months of war. Their stories offer a snapshot of the vast human loss — one in every 73 of Gaza’s 2.2 million people.
More than two-thirds of the total deaths were women and children, the local authorities say. Often, they were killed with their families in Israeli airstrikes. Many thousands were fighters for Hamas, according to Israel, which says it is trying to eliminate the group that led the Oct. 7 attacks while limiting civilian casualties.
Hamas ruled Gaza and ran a covert military organization, the identity of its fighters unclear, even to other Gazans. Some residents supported it, some opposed it, everyone had to live with it. After decades of conflict, hatred of Israel was common, and many Gazans, including some of those below, cheered the fighters who attacked Israel.
Here are some of the people who have been killed in Gaza, as recalled by friends and relatives and documented in social media posts, news articles and other sources.
GAZA IS a youthful place, with nearly half of the population under 18, according to UNICEF. Gaza’s health authorities say that more than 13,000 children have been killed in the war.
She and her twin sister had names that rhymed. She loved to adorn her outfits with colorful accessories and relished the attention she and her sister received from neighbors. She was killed in a strike on her family’s building. Her sister, Marah, survived, as did their father and mother, who gave birth to a third daughter a few weeks later. They named her Farah.
Farah Alkhatib, 12
The older sister loved Kinder chocolate, Pringles and strawberry juice. The younger loved to play with a plastic jeep embellished with a duck.
Siwar and Selena al-Raiss, 3 years and 21 months
Her father bought her a violin, and she loved it, taking lessons at a Palestinian music school. She dreamed of becoming a star.
Lubna Elian, 14
He was close with his father and tagged along with his mother to the gym where she worked as a trainer. She called him “medallion,” because he was always hanging on his parents. He wanted to be a doctor, like his father.
Yousef Abu Moussa, 6
She was a top student who liked to draw nature scenes, rollerblade and jump on her trampoline. During the war, she played teacher to her siblings and cousins to distract them. She was killed in a strike that destroyed her family’s home. Her sister, Leen, 8, died four days later, trapped in the rubble.
Nada Abdulhadi, 10
She was the center of attention. Her mother, Maram, loved to dress her up for pictures. She was killed in October. Her mother was killed in a separate strike 11 days later.
Youmna Shaqalih, 4 months
GAZA’S ISOLATION and its school system gave it an uncommon mix: an educated population with high poverty and unemployment rates. Many Gazans with strong credentials struggled to find suitable employment.
He studied engineering in Gaza and Spain before trying unsuccessfully to settle in Norway, where he worked in an Italian restaurant. Back in Gaza, with engineering jobs scarce, he opened an eatery, Italiano, that served pizza, calzones, salads and shawarma. It was so successful that in 2021 it moved into a shiny new location, with dozens of employees, three floors and rooms for private events. He was killed with his parents and two brothers in a strike on the building. His wife and two children, 3 and 6, survived.
Abdulrahman Abuamara, 39
In the two years before the war, she earned a university degree in software engineering, got married and became pregnant with her first child. She was killed alongside her husband before the baby was born.
Ghadeer Mohammed Mansour, 24
The twins did not find work related to their university degrees in English literature, so they started a business importing clothes, shoes and accessories to resell from their family’s apartment, often delivering orders themselves. They pumped iron at Oxygen Gym and posted their workouts on Instagram.
Salah and Khaled Jadallah, 27
The twins’ sister, killed in the same strike as her brothers and her father, worked as a medical laboratory analyst at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza and at a private lab, which featured her smile in its advertisements to encourage patients to come in for tests. She cherished her financial independence and dreamed of earning a master’s degree.
Doaa Jadallah, 29
He did translation for a human rights group and worked for a think tank focused on improving Palestinians’ lives. Shortly before the war, he received a scholarship for a master’s degree in international relations in Australia. He hoped to become a diplomat. He was killed alongside 20 family members in a strike that destroyed his family’s home.
Mahmoud Alnaouq, 25
She worked in graphic design to help support her family while studying multimedia at a Gaza university. She hoped to teach there one day.
Jannat Iyad Abu Zbeada, 21
He had a degree in business administration but took construction jobs he hated and helped his family fish off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast. He loved soccer and supported F.C. Barcelona. His life’s longest trip took about an hour, a drive to a friend’s wedding elsewhere in Gaza.
Rami Abu Reyaleh, 32
He tried to start a new life outside Gaza, spending time in Egypt, Turkey, Bolivia and Argentina and crossing the dangerous Darién Gap in Panama to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. He claimed political asylum, telling the U.S. authorities that he had been a member of Hamas’s military wing for a few years before fleeing Gaza to escape the group. He was denied asylum and returned to Gaza before the war. He chipped in at his family’s furniture business and considered getting married. “I wanted to get out, I swear to God, because I don’t bet on Gaza,” he wrote on Facebook as the war raged. “But unfortunately I couldn’t get out and it was my shitty fate that I am living through a third war on this cursed land.”
Motaz Alhelou, 31
GAZA HAS BEEN under a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt since Hamas seized control in 2007. The blockade has shaped nearly every aspect of life, limiting the movement of goods in and out of the territory and making it difficult, if not impossible, for many Gazans to leave. In that period, there have also been several wars and deadly clashes with Israel.
She raised five children — four boys and a girl — who gave her 15 grandchildren. She was set to leave Gaza for the first time, to visit Turkey with her husband to see two of their adult sons and their families. She had packed several suitcases with traditional Palestinian foods: olive oil, a spice mix called za’atar and local greens used to make stew. But the war broke out three days before the trip. She never left.
Faida AlKrunz, 60
His parents were displaced to Gaza from what became Israel in 1948. He never finished high school but worked to support his 12 siblings. His experience gave him an enduring faith in education for his five children, to make sure they had better lives. Later, he mediated family conflicts, often siding with his sons’ wives over his sons. He was killed in October alongside his wife, Faida (above), and nine of their children and grandchildren.
Saud AlKrunz, 61
He was a car mechanic who loved to tinker, including making the gate to his family’s home automatic. He left Gaza only once, for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where his brother lived. He didn’t know how to scan his passport at the airport. It was his first time on an airplane. “Everything was new to him,” his brother said.
Ahmed Abu Shaeera, 39
An Islamic scholar, he preached at Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a holy site cherished by Palestinians. He later served as the minister of religious affairs for the Palestinian Authority and remained committed to Jerusalem. “Palestine has no value without Jerusalem, which is the pearl of Palestine, and Jerusalem has no value without Al Aqsa,” he said.
Youssef Salama, 69
She focused on mental health, a rare but much-needed specialty in Gaza, at the Palestine Red Crescent Society. She worked with people who had been wounded and displaced by Israeli attacks on Gaza as well as with first responders.
Hedaya Hamad, 43
Enchanted by online videos of parkour enthusiasts doing stunts in urban spaces around the world, he tried it himself on Gaza’s beaches. After the 2021 Israel-Gaza conflict, he practiced on the rubble, leaping, landing and rolling on buildings brought down by Israeli airstrikes. “When Salah played, he felt free,” recalled a friend from the Free Gaza Circus Center, where he taught circus arts to children.
Salah Abo Harbed, 23
Born into a refugee family and a member of Gaza’s Greek Orthodox Christian minority, he lived through several wars but still believed that all humans, including the Israelis who occupied and imposed a blockade on Gaza, were created in God’s image. He fondly recalled working as a bank accountant in Israel decades ago and thought it was still possible for the peoples of the Holy Land to live together. He died from an undiagnosed health crisis after clashes prevented him from reaching a hospital.
Jeries Sayegh, 67
MANY RESIDENTS had differing views about what Gaza could be.
She broke barriers in Gaza’s socially conservative society as an actor, playwright and artist. She performed in plays in Gaza and elsewhere and starred in films, including “Sara” in 2014, which addressed the taboo topic of femicide. She taught theater and arts in Gaza and at the ASHTAR theater in Jerusalem. She moved to Egypt after the 2014 Gaza war but returned a few months before the current war. She was killed in her home with three of her five children.
Inas Al-Saqqa, 53
While studying law, he hosted planning meetings and designed banners for protests under the slogan “We Want to Live,” which criticized Hamas’s governance of Gaza and called for better living conditions. But reflecting the complex views many Gazans hold toward Hamas, he lauded “the men of the resistance” on Oct. 7. “Officially, today is the greatest day in our generation’s entire life.”
Sayel Al-Hinnawi, 22
He founded a media production company and worked as a filmmaker and photographer. He served as a camera assistant on Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary “Human Flow” and liked to show Gaza in a positive light, especially with drone footage shot near the sea. He was on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia with his wife and baby daughter when the war broke out, and returned home to document the conflict, posting a video that called the Oct. 7 attackers “Palestinian freedom fighters.”
Roshdi al-Sarraj, 31
She made paintings in bold colors about Palestinian themes, showing mosques and churches side by side and the Old City of Jerusalem, which she was never able to visit. She had four sons, supported her family as an art teacher and was trying to put on her first exhibition.
Heba Zagout, 38
For a decade and a half, he served coffee at Mazaj, an upscale cafe in downtown Gaza City, helping it reopen swiftly after each conflict. “So we meet again,” he told returning customers. “We are all alive.”
Ali al-Sharawi, 45
GAZA is a small place, about six times the size of Manhattan, with a higher population density than Chicago. People forged close ties with large, extended families and their neighbors, often depending on one another.
She was a jokester who took care of her siblings and mother, a widow, with whom she ran a business doing traditional Palestinian embroidery. She had recently completed a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Amneh al-Hana, 38
He was a fitness enthusiast who taught physical education at the American International School in Gaza and volunteered as the coach of the Palestine Athletics Federation. He kept his athletes going despite poor facilities, often buying them training shoes with his own money. He called Oct. 7 “a bright morning for the Palestinians and the resounding fall of Israel” in a post on Facebook.
Belal Abu Samaan, 38
He performed complicated operations on Gaza’s war wounded while running Abu Yousef Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah until his retirement. His wife, also a doctor, died of cancer, and he dealt with loneliness by hosting large meals to bring people into his home.
Dr. Abdallah Shehada, 69
A member of Gaza’s Greek Orthodox Christian minority, he studied aviation engineering in Egypt and worked for airlines in Libya and Uganda before returning to Gaza and managing an aid program for the United Nations. He lived near the sea and swam often when the weather was warm. He sheltered with other Christians in a church during the war and died after clashes prevented him from reaching a hospital after his gallbladder ruptured.
Farajallah Tarazi, 80
She was a physical therapist who was working toward certification to teach yoga to other women. She dreamed of visiting Ireland.
Heba Jourany, 29 (center)
He opened his first marble workshop in his garage and expanded his business to produce marble and granite countertops, sinks and stairs at a factory in Gaza City. He raised pigeons and goats.
Osama Al-Haddad, 50
He worked in factories and on construction sites in Israel before the Gaza blockade and spoke fondly of that time, saying he wished the situation would improve so that he could go back. In the meantime, he loved to sit in the sun, smoke cigarettes and drink tea with so much sugar that it became a family joke.
Riyad Alkhatib, 58
The father of the child violinist, he worked for the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, coordinating rare treatment outside Gaza for patients with serious illnesses. He told a friend, “There is something beautiful in Gaza despite everything that happens.”
Mahmoud Elian, 47
Photos, memories, documents, photos and information about the dead were provided in interviews with relatives, friends and other associates. Those sources include Mohamed Shamiya (friend of Abdulrahman Abuamara), Khaled Abu Shaeera (brother of Ahmed Abu Shaeera), Asmaa Alkaisi (friend of Ali al-Sharawi and Mahmoud Elian), Beirut Hana (cousin of Amneh al-Hana), Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (relative of Farah Alkhatib, nephew of Riyad Alkhatib and nephew of Dr. Abdallah Shehada), Ali Jadallah (brother of Doaa, Salah and Khaled Jadallah), Khalid Balata (cousin of Dua, Salah and Khaled Jadallah), Tarek Masoud (friend of Salah and Khaled Jadallah), Mahmoud AlKrunz (son of Faida and Saud AlKrunz), Ruba Tarazi (daughter of Farajallah Tarazi), Ola Salama (friend of Ghadeer Mohammed Mansour and niece of Youssef Salama), Amal Khayal (teacher of Heba Jourany), Maysaa Ghazi (sister of Heba Zagout), Osama Al-Kahlout (colleague of Hedaya Hamad), Farah Sedo (daughter of Inas Al-Saqqa), Rawaa Iyad (sister of Jannat Iyad Abu Zbeada), Khalil Sayegh (son of Jeries Sayegh), Khitam Attaallah (aunt of Lubna Elian), Ahmed Alnaouq (brother of Mahmoud Alnaouq), Maha Hussaini (work supervisor of Mahmoud Alnaouq), Mahmoud Alhelou (brother of Motaz Alhelou), Ramsey Judah (lawyer of Motaz Alhelou), Said Shoaib (uncle of Nada Abdulhadi), Mohammed Al-Haddad (son of Osama Al-Haddad), Yazan Ahmed (friend of Rami Abu Reyaleh), Shrouq Aila (wife of Roshdi al-Sarraj), Mahmod al-Sarraj (brother of Roshdi al-Sarraj), Mohammad Khader (Gaza Circus member with Salah Abo Harbed), Mohammed Altooli (friend of Sayel Al-Hinnawi), Mohammad al-Raiss (father of Siwar and Selena al-Raiss), Madlian Shaqalih (aunt of Youmna Shaqalih) and Mohammed Abu Moussa (father of Yousef Abu Moussa).
Additional photo source: Reuters (photo of Youssef Salama)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
One Year of War in Sudan: How Two Rival Generals Wrecked Their Country
The fighting between two generals leading competing military factions has now been going on for a year, leading to massacres, hunger and a massive wave of people fleeing their homes.
Plumes of black smoke rise in the sky over a city scape of low-rise buildings.
The aftermath of an aerial bombardment, during clashes between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese army in Khartoum North, Sudan, in May 2023.Credit...Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters
Abdi Latif DahirDeclan Walsh
By Abdi Latif Dahir and Declan Walsh
Reporting from Nairobi
The forces of two rival generals have laid waste to Sudan for a year now, unleashing a wave of violence that has driven 8.6 million people from their homes — now one of the largest waves of displaced people in the world.
The war has reordered Africa’s third-largest nation with breathtaking speed. It has gutted the capital, Khartoum, once a major center of commerce and culture on the Nile. Deserted neighborhoods are now filled with bullet-scarred buildings and bodies buried in shallow graves, according to residents and aid workers.
More than a third of Sudan’s 48 million people are facing catastrophic levels of hunger, according to the United Nations, since harvests and aid deliveries have been disrupted. Nearly 230,000 severely malnourished children and new mothers are facing death in the coming months if they don’t get food and health care, the U.N. Population Fund has warned. Dozens of hospitals and clinics have been shuttered, aid workers say. The closure of schools and universities in a country that once drew many foreign students has precipitated what the U.N. says is “the worst education crisis in the world.”
A map of Sudan showing the Darfur region and El Gezira state. The cities of Khartoum, Omdurman and Wad Madani are labeled. The surrounding countries labeled include Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya and South Sudan.
By The New York Times
Atrocities continue to mount in Darfur, the western region wracked by two decades of genocidal violence. Civilians have been slaughtered, aid camps and homes burned and refugees who fled previous violence are crossing the border into Chad, vowing never to go home again.
The death toll from the yearlong fighting has surpassed 15,600, with many more injured, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project — though U.N. officials and Sudanese health workers believe the actual toll is far higher.
Of the millions displaced by the conflict, more than 6.6 million remain inside Sudan, according to the U.N. refugee agency. Almost 1.8 million others have fled to neighboring nations, including South Sudan, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic.
The continued clashes between the two generals’ competing flanks — the army and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces — have also dashed hopes that Sudan will usher in civilian rule anytime soon.
Here is a look at what is happening in Sudan.
Image
A line of people rides pack animals and walks on a dirt road.
Sudanese people, who fled the conflict in Murnei in Sudan’s Darfur region, cross the border between Sudan and Chad in Adre, Chad, in August.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
What is the state of the fighting?
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces remain dominant in Khartoum, where the fighting first began in April 2023. In December, it captured Wad Madani, the capital of the breadbasket El Gezira state, where tens of thousands of people fled when the war started.
In the western region of Darfur, the Rapid Support Forces have been accused of committing a wave of atrocities, By the end of April, the paramilitary group had encircled El Fasher, the last city in Darfur still held by the army.
Sudan’s army holds much of the country’s east, including the city of Port Sudan on the Red Sea. In March, the army ousted the paramilitary forces from large pockets of Omdurman, a strategic city across the Nile from Khartoum, according to a resident and aid workers.
Regional analysts and security experts say the army is trying to use this newfound momentum to mobilize and recapture other areas from the paramilitary group.
Repeated attempts to reach a cease-fire have not been successful. U.N. calls for the cessation of hostilities for certain periods have been ignored. Humanitarian agencies are struggling to deliver aid, citing fighting, threats, blocked roads and tax requirements.
Tom Perriello, the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan, said last month that he was hoping for a resumption of talks in the days following a high-level donor conference in Paris on April 15. Donor nations pledged more than two billion euros (or over $1.2 billion) in aid for Sudan, French president Emmanuel Macron said at the end of the conference.
Who are the rival generals?
Image
Two uniformed generals, surrounded by others in uniform, stand on the bed of trucks, raising hands in the air.
Sudan’s army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan,
Sudan’s army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, in left photo, and Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, right, head of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary unit, in 2019.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has been Sudan’s de facto leader since 2019.
He rose to power in the tumultuous aftermath of the uprising against President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan’s leader of three decades, who was ousted in April 2019 following protests.
Before that, General al-Burhan had been a regional army commander in Darfur, where 300,000 people were killed and millions of others displaced in fighting from 2003 to 2008 that drew worldwide condemnation.
After civilians and the military signed a power-sharing agreement in 2019, General al-Burhan became the chairman of the Sovereignty Council, a body created to oversee Sudan’s transition to democratic rule. But as the date for the handover of control to civilians approached in late 2021, he proved reluctant to relinquish power.
General al-Burhan’s main rival is Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, who leads the country’s Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group.
Of humble origins, General Hamdan, widely known as Hemeti, rose to prominence as a commander of the notorious Janjaweed militias, which were responsible for the worst atrocities of the conflict in Darfur.
In October 2021, General al-Burhan and General Hamdan united to seize power in a military coup, making them effectively the leader and deputy leader of Sudan. But they soon fell out.
Many diplomats, including those from the United States, attempted to negotiate an agreement between the two generals that would see them hand power back to civilians.
However, they could not agree on how quickly the Rapid Support Forces would be absorbed into the army. In April 2023, after months of rising tensions, their troops went to war against each other.
Both leaders have traveled outside of Sudan in the past year to seek political support. General al-Burhan addressed the U.N. General Assembly, while General Hamdan traveled to several African nations. In a speech this April, General al-Burhan said that his forces are bent on fighting until victory.
Image
A boy sits on a rocky outcrop overlooking a camp.
A refugee camp near the Chad-Sudan border, in Adre, Chad, in November.Credit...El Tayeb Siddig/Reuters
Why are many other countries invested in the conflict?
Sudan occupies a pivotal position on the African continent. It has a substantial coastline on the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes. It shares borders with seven countries — the Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya and South Sudan — many also threatened by instability.
The violence has spread throughout Darfur, home to several local armed groups that have already been sucked into the fight. Darfur was also a base for Russian mercenaries with the Wagner group, which received access to lucrative gold mining operations in the past. Although Wagner was officially disbanded, Russian mercenaries are believed to be operating in Sudan. Ukrainian forces have reportedly conducted operations alongside Sudan’s army against the paramilitary forces who are backed by Russian mercenaries.
The United Arab Emirates has also been secretly supplying arms and providing medical treatment to the paramilitary forces through an air base in Chad, according to several African and Western officials. The Emiratis have said that their operation is purely humanitarian.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/sudan-k ... 778d3e6de3
The fighting between two generals leading competing military factions has now been going on for a year, leading to massacres, hunger and a massive wave of people fleeing their homes.
Plumes of black smoke rise in the sky over a city scape of low-rise buildings.
The aftermath of an aerial bombardment, during clashes between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese army in Khartoum North, Sudan, in May 2023.Credit...Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters
Abdi Latif DahirDeclan Walsh
By Abdi Latif Dahir and Declan Walsh
Reporting from Nairobi
The forces of two rival generals have laid waste to Sudan for a year now, unleashing a wave of violence that has driven 8.6 million people from their homes — now one of the largest waves of displaced people in the world.
The war has reordered Africa’s third-largest nation with breathtaking speed. It has gutted the capital, Khartoum, once a major center of commerce and culture on the Nile. Deserted neighborhoods are now filled with bullet-scarred buildings and bodies buried in shallow graves, according to residents and aid workers.
More than a third of Sudan’s 48 million people are facing catastrophic levels of hunger, according to the United Nations, since harvests and aid deliveries have been disrupted. Nearly 230,000 severely malnourished children and new mothers are facing death in the coming months if they don’t get food and health care, the U.N. Population Fund has warned. Dozens of hospitals and clinics have been shuttered, aid workers say. The closure of schools and universities in a country that once drew many foreign students has precipitated what the U.N. says is “the worst education crisis in the world.”
A map of Sudan showing the Darfur region and El Gezira state. The cities of Khartoum, Omdurman and Wad Madani are labeled. The surrounding countries labeled include Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya and South Sudan.
By The New York Times
Atrocities continue to mount in Darfur, the western region wracked by two decades of genocidal violence. Civilians have been slaughtered, aid camps and homes burned and refugees who fled previous violence are crossing the border into Chad, vowing never to go home again.
The death toll from the yearlong fighting has surpassed 15,600, with many more injured, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project — though U.N. officials and Sudanese health workers believe the actual toll is far higher.
Of the millions displaced by the conflict, more than 6.6 million remain inside Sudan, according to the U.N. refugee agency. Almost 1.8 million others have fled to neighboring nations, including South Sudan, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic.
The continued clashes between the two generals’ competing flanks — the army and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces — have also dashed hopes that Sudan will usher in civilian rule anytime soon.
Here is a look at what is happening in Sudan.
Image
A line of people rides pack animals and walks on a dirt road.
Sudanese people, who fled the conflict in Murnei in Sudan’s Darfur region, cross the border between Sudan and Chad in Adre, Chad, in August.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
What is the state of the fighting?
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces remain dominant in Khartoum, where the fighting first began in April 2023. In December, it captured Wad Madani, the capital of the breadbasket El Gezira state, where tens of thousands of people fled when the war started.
In the western region of Darfur, the Rapid Support Forces have been accused of committing a wave of atrocities, By the end of April, the paramilitary group had encircled El Fasher, the last city in Darfur still held by the army.
Sudan’s army holds much of the country’s east, including the city of Port Sudan on the Red Sea. In March, the army ousted the paramilitary forces from large pockets of Omdurman, a strategic city across the Nile from Khartoum, according to a resident and aid workers.
Regional analysts and security experts say the army is trying to use this newfound momentum to mobilize and recapture other areas from the paramilitary group.
Repeated attempts to reach a cease-fire have not been successful. U.N. calls for the cessation of hostilities for certain periods have been ignored. Humanitarian agencies are struggling to deliver aid, citing fighting, threats, blocked roads and tax requirements.
Tom Perriello, the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan, said last month that he was hoping for a resumption of talks in the days following a high-level donor conference in Paris on April 15. Donor nations pledged more than two billion euros (or over $1.2 billion) in aid for Sudan, French president Emmanuel Macron said at the end of the conference.
Who are the rival generals?
Image
Two uniformed generals, surrounded by others in uniform, stand on the bed of trucks, raising hands in the air.
Sudan’s army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan,
Sudan’s army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, in left photo, and Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, right, head of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary unit, in 2019.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has been Sudan’s de facto leader since 2019.
He rose to power in the tumultuous aftermath of the uprising against President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan’s leader of three decades, who was ousted in April 2019 following protests.
Before that, General al-Burhan had been a regional army commander in Darfur, where 300,000 people were killed and millions of others displaced in fighting from 2003 to 2008 that drew worldwide condemnation.
After civilians and the military signed a power-sharing agreement in 2019, General al-Burhan became the chairman of the Sovereignty Council, a body created to oversee Sudan’s transition to democratic rule. But as the date for the handover of control to civilians approached in late 2021, he proved reluctant to relinquish power.
General al-Burhan’s main rival is Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, who leads the country’s Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group.
Of humble origins, General Hamdan, widely known as Hemeti, rose to prominence as a commander of the notorious Janjaweed militias, which were responsible for the worst atrocities of the conflict in Darfur.
In October 2021, General al-Burhan and General Hamdan united to seize power in a military coup, making them effectively the leader and deputy leader of Sudan. But they soon fell out.
Many diplomats, including those from the United States, attempted to negotiate an agreement between the two generals that would see them hand power back to civilians.
However, they could not agree on how quickly the Rapid Support Forces would be absorbed into the army. In April 2023, after months of rising tensions, their troops went to war against each other.
Both leaders have traveled outside of Sudan in the past year to seek political support. General al-Burhan addressed the U.N. General Assembly, while General Hamdan traveled to several African nations. In a speech this April, General al-Burhan said that his forces are bent on fighting until victory.
Image
A boy sits on a rocky outcrop overlooking a camp.
A refugee camp near the Chad-Sudan border, in Adre, Chad, in November.Credit...El Tayeb Siddig/Reuters
Why are many other countries invested in the conflict?
Sudan occupies a pivotal position on the African continent. It has a substantial coastline on the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes. It shares borders with seven countries — the Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya and South Sudan — many also threatened by instability.
The violence has spread throughout Darfur, home to several local armed groups that have already been sucked into the fight. Darfur was also a base for Russian mercenaries with the Wagner group, which received access to lucrative gold mining operations in the past. Although Wagner was officially disbanded, Russian mercenaries are believed to be operating in Sudan. Ukrainian forces have reportedly conducted operations alongside Sudan’s army against the paramilitary forces who are backed by Russian mercenaries.
The United Arab Emirates has also been secretly supplying arms and providing medical treatment to the paramilitary forces through an air base in Chad, according to several African and Western officials. The Emiratis have said that their operation is purely humanitarian.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/sudan-k ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
About 300,000 Gazans Have Fled Rafah, U.N. Says
The Israeli military has expanded its evacuation orders for Rafah, deepening fears that it was preparing a full-scale invasion of the city in southern Gaza.
Palestinians seeking water at a tent camp in Deir al Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on Saturday.Credit...Ramadan Abed/Reuters
The main United Nations agency aiding Palestinians in Gaza said early Sunday that about 300,000 people had fled over the past week from Rafah, the city in the enclave’s southernmost tip where more than a million displaced Gazans had sought shelter from Israeli bombardments elsewhere over the past seven months.
The U.N. agency, known as UNRWA, made the announcement on social media hours after the Israeli government issued new evacuation orders in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza, deepening fears that the Israeli military was preparing to invade the city despite international warnings.
The World Food Program echoed those warnings on Sunday, expressing concern about displacement of civilians and saying that a full-scale invasion of Rafah would be “catastrophic.”
“Families are once again on the move, searching for shelter, food, water — but with fewer resources,” it wrote on social media.
Paltel, the Gaza Strip’s largest telecommunications company, said on Sunday that internet service was down in parts of southern Gaza because of Israeli military operations and that crews were working to restore services “as quickly as possible.”
Doctors Without Borders, an aid group whose staff members have been working in Gaza during the war, also said on social media that it had started to refer the last 22 patients at one hospital, the Rafah Indonesian Field Hospital, to other facilities because it could “no longer guarantee their safety.”
Gaza’s health care system is in a state of near collapse, and one of the three major hospitals in Rafah that were partly functioning before the Israeli military’s operation there this month has already shut down.
There has been intense bombardment and fighting around Rafah since Monday, when Israel seized control of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, largely halting the flow of aid. Dozens of people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Rafah since then, local health officials say.
Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets over parts of Rafah and over a part of northern Gaza on Saturday that ordered people to flee. The warning about Rafah added to existing evacuations orders there.
The Israeli military has told Gazans in Rafah to temporarily evacuate to an “expanded humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi,” a coastal area north of the city that the United Nations and international officials have stressed is neither safe nor equipped to receive them.
“Forcing civilians to evacuate Rafah to unsafe zones is intolerable,” Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, wrote late Saturday on the social media platform X. He urged Israel not to go ahead with a ground offensive in Rafah, saying it would “further exacerbate an already dire humanitarian crisis.”
The United Nations said last week that many of those fleeing Rafah were heading to the southern city of Khan Younis or further north along the coast to Deir al Balah, in central Gaza. Both areas lack basic services.
Israel has called its incursions into eastern Rafah this month “precise operations” targeting Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attacks into southern Israel. Several countries and international aid groups have condemned the prospect of a full-scale Rafah invasion, saying it would be catastrophic for civilians.
President Biden paused an arms shipment to Israel out of concern that the weapons might be used in a major assault on Rafah, and he has warned that the United States would withhold certain weapons, including heavy bombs and artillery shells, if Israel goes ahead with the operation.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.
Mike Ives is a reporter for The Times based in Seoul, covering breaking news around the world. More about Mike Ives
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/worl ... _id=166408
The Israeli military has expanded its evacuation orders for Rafah, deepening fears that it was preparing a full-scale invasion of the city in southern Gaza.
Palestinians seeking water at a tent camp in Deir al Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on Saturday.Credit...Ramadan Abed/Reuters
The main United Nations agency aiding Palestinians in Gaza said early Sunday that about 300,000 people had fled over the past week from Rafah, the city in the enclave’s southernmost tip where more than a million displaced Gazans had sought shelter from Israeli bombardments elsewhere over the past seven months.
The U.N. agency, known as UNRWA, made the announcement on social media hours after the Israeli government issued new evacuation orders in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza, deepening fears that the Israeli military was preparing to invade the city despite international warnings.
The World Food Program echoed those warnings on Sunday, expressing concern about displacement of civilians and saying that a full-scale invasion of Rafah would be “catastrophic.”
“Families are once again on the move, searching for shelter, food, water — but with fewer resources,” it wrote on social media.
Paltel, the Gaza Strip’s largest telecommunications company, said on Sunday that internet service was down in parts of southern Gaza because of Israeli military operations and that crews were working to restore services “as quickly as possible.”
Doctors Without Borders, an aid group whose staff members have been working in Gaza during the war, also said on social media that it had started to refer the last 22 patients at one hospital, the Rafah Indonesian Field Hospital, to other facilities because it could “no longer guarantee their safety.”
Gaza’s health care system is in a state of near collapse, and one of the three major hospitals in Rafah that were partly functioning before the Israeli military’s operation there this month has already shut down.
There has been intense bombardment and fighting around Rafah since Monday, when Israel seized control of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, largely halting the flow of aid. Dozens of people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Rafah since then, local health officials say.
Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets over parts of Rafah and over a part of northern Gaza on Saturday that ordered people to flee. The warning about Rafah added to existing evacuations orders there.
The Israeli military has told Gazans in Rafah to temporarily evacuate to an “expanded humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi,” a coastal area north of the city that the United Nations and international officials have stressed is neither safe nor equipped to receive them.
“Forcing civilians to evacuate Rafah to unsafe zones is intolerable,” Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, wrote late Saturday on the social media platform X. He urged Israel not to go ahead with a ground offensive in Rafah, saying it would “further exacerbate an already dire humanitarian crisis.”
The United Nations said last week that many of those fleeing Rafah were heading to the southern city of Khan Younis or further north along the coast to Deir al Balah, in central Gaza. Both areas lack basic services.
Israel has called its incursions into eastern Rafah this month “precise operations” targeting Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attacks into southern Israel. Several countries and international aid groups have condemned the prospect of a full-scale Rafah invasion, saying it would be catastrophic for civilians.
President Biden paused an arms shipment to Israel out of concern that the weapons might be used in a major assault on Rafah, and he has warned that the United States would withhold certain weapons, including heavy bombs and artillery shells, if Israel goes ahead with the operation.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.
Mike Ives is a reporter for The Times based in Seoul, covering breaking news around the world. More about Mike Ives
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/worl ... _id=166408
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
From the Embers of an Old Genocide, a New One May Be Emerging
A 15-year-old Darfur girl who was the victim of a sexual assault sits outside a shelter after fleeing to Chad.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
First they killed the adults.
“Then they piled up the children and shot them,” a witness told Human Rights Watch. “They threw their bodies into the river.”
That’s a scene from a humanitarian crisis happening now in Sudan that has been overshadowed by Gaza and Ukraine and may be about to get far worse. It’s a conflict, by some accounts a genocide, unfolding particularly in the Darfur region there.
You may remember Darfur: It was the site of a genocide two decades ago. Those atrocities galvanized a vast response, led by protesters across the United States. Barack Obama and Joe Biden, then senators, were among those who called for action, and they were joined by tens of thousands of high school and college students, plus activists from churches, synagogues and mosques working together.
While hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in Darfur at that time, the campaign also probably saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. Other countries imposed sanctions and an arms embargo, peacekeeping forces were established by the African Union and the United Nations, and the Sudanese leader who commanded the genocide was eventually ousted.
Yet today the slaughter in Darfur is resuming — and the international response is not. Most Western nations and African ones alike have been fairly indifferent.
“The inaction pales in comparison to the situation 20 years ago, when global leaders felt morally and legally obliged to act on Darfur,” Human Rights Watch noted in a new 228-page report.
Some of the same Arab forces responsible for the genocide in the 2000s are picking up where they left off. They are massacring, torturing, raping and mutilating members of non-Arab ethnic groups — the same victims as before — while burning or bulldozing their villages, survivors say.
There’s a racist element: Arab militias mock their victims as “slaves” and taunt them with racial epithets — the non-Arabs are often darker skinned. The militias seem to be trying to systematically eliminate non-Arab tribes from the area.
The Rapid Support Forces, an Arab militia associated with the worst atrocities, is on the edge of the city of El Fasher, with some 800,000 inhabitants, and may be about to sack it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, warns that El Fasher is “on the precipice of a large-scale massacre.”
In addition, food is running out in Sudan, and gunmen have blocked aid groups from delivering food. The U.N. World Food Program reports that with 28 million Sudanese facing acute hunger, people are resorting to eating grass and peanut shells.
Cindy McCain, the leader of the World Food Program, warned that Sudan may soon constitute the world’s worst hunger crisis, risking millions of lives. “Today, the people of Sudan have been forgotten,” she added.
One gauge of the global indifference: Countries have offered only 8 percent of what the U.N. needs to support refugees who have poured out of Sudan — including almost 600,000 who have reached Chad in the last year, 88 percent of whom are women or children.
The latest crisis in Sudan is the result of a civil war that began a year ago between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, both Arab dominated. The attacks on civilians like the non-Arab tribes, amounting to collateral damage in the civil war, have been particularly vicious in Darfur.
When the non-Arab governor of West Darfur protested what he called an “ongoing genocide,” he was detained by the Rapid Support Forces and executed. Videos circulated that showed his corpse stripped and mutilated.
The Rapid Support Forces have been killing boys and men and raping women and girls, according to accounts from human rights monitors and survivors. In interviews with Reuters, more than 40 mothers described how their children, mostly sons, had been killed by Rapid Support Forces. One was a 2-year-old boy beaten to death in front of his mother, who was shot below the shoulder when she tried to intervene.
The Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights issued a report concluding that the atrocities meet the legal standard of genocide, adding that it is “a repeat genocide, and a repeat failure.”
“The international community has completely abandoned the non-Arab communities of Darfur facing an ongoing genocide,” said Yonah Diamond, senior legal counsel to the Wallenberg Center.
And the global response? The U.N. Security Council has passed a pair of pathetic resolutions calling for a cease-fire, most recently merely for the month of Ramadan. This week, the U.S. sanctioned two Rapid Support Forces commanders for their actions in Darfur, a move that is welcome but far from enough. It’s appalling that leading countries not only can’t muster significant action, they also can’t even manage a significant statement.
What we can do is push, as was done two decades ago, for a much greater effort to end the civil war in Sudan. That means an arms embargo and firm pressure on countries like the United Arab Emirates that (despite its denials) appear to be fueling the war with weapons shipments to the Rapid Support Forces. A U.N. report cites evidence of cargo flights several times each week carrying weapons from the U.A.E. to the Rapid Support Forces via Chad.
Sports figures, business leaders and celebrities visiting the U.A.E. should question why it chooses to provide weapons used for mass atrocities.
Leading countries can also impose sanctions on Sudanese figures and press the African Union and the African members of the Security Council to show leadership. A Security Council visit to the border with Chad would highlight the crisis, as would other high-level visits and statements.
“Darfur has been abandoned by everyone,” said Tirana Hassan, the executive director of Human Rights Watch.
So, in impoverished Darfur, the vow after every genocide of “never again” risks becoming “one more time.”
More on Darfur
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A 15-year-old Darfur girl who was the victim of a sexual assault sits outside a shelter after fleeing to Chad.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
First they killed the adults.
“Then they piled up the children and shot them,” a witness told Human Rights Watch. “They threw their bodies into the river.”
That’s a scene from a humanitarian crisis happening now in Sudan that has been overshadowed by Gaza and Ukraine and may be about to get far worse. It’s a conflict, by some accounts a genocide, unfolding particularly in the Darfur region there.
You may remember Darfur: It was the site of a genocide two decades ago. Those atrocities galvanized a vast response, led by protesters across the United States. Barack Obama and Joe Biden, then senators, were among those who called for action, and they were joined by tens of thousands of high school and college students, plus activists from churches, synagogues and mosques working together.
While hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in Darfur at that time, the campaign also probably saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. Other countries imposed sanctions and an arms embargo, peacekeeping forces were established by the African Union and the United Nations, and the Sudanese leader who commanded the genocide was eventually ousted.
Yet today the slaughter in Darfur is resuming — and the international response is not. Most Western nations and African ones alike have been fairly indifferent.
“The inaction pales in comparison to the situation 20 years ago, when global leaders felt morally and legally obliged to act on Darfur,” Human Rights Watch noted in a new 228-page report.
Some of the same Arab forces responsible for the genocide in the 2000s are picking up where they left off. They are massacring, torturing, raping and mutilating members of non-Arab ethnic groups — the same victims as before — while burning or bulldozing their villages, survivors say.
There’s a racist element: Arab militias mock their victims as “slaves” and taunt them with racial epithets — the non-Arabs are often darker skinned. The militias seem to be trying to systematically eliminate non-Arab tribes from the area.
The Rapid Support Forces, an Arab militia associated with the worst atrocities, is on the edge of the city of El Fasher, with some 800,000 inhabitants, and may be about to sack it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, warns that El Fasher is “on the precipice of a large-scale massacre.”
In addition, food is running out in Sudan, and gunmen have blocked aid groups from delivering food. The U.N. World Food Program reports that with 28 million Sudanese facing acute hunger, people are resorting to eating grass and peanut shells.
Cindy McCain, the leader of the World Food Program, warned that Sudan may soon constitute the world’s worst hunger crisis, risking millions of lives. “Today, the people of Sudan have been forgotten,” she added.
One gauge of the global indifference: Countries have offered only 8 percent of what the U.N. needs to support refugees who have poured out of Sudan — including almost 600,000 who have reached Chad in the last year, 88 percent of whom are women or children.
The latest crisis in Sudan is the result of a civil war that began a year ago between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, both Arab dominated. The attacks on civilians like the non-Arab tribes, amounting to collateral damage in the civil war, have been particularly vicious in Darfur.
When the non-Arab governor of West Darfur protested what he called an “ongoing genocide,” he was detained by the Rapid Support Forces and executed. Videos circulated that showed his corpse stripped and mutilated.
The Rapid Support Forces have been killing boys and men and raping women and girls, according to accounts from human rights monitors and survivors. In interviews with Reuters, more than 40 mothers described how their children, mostly sons, had been killed by Rapid Support Forces. One was a 2-year-old boy beaten to death in front of his mother, who was shot below the shoulder when she tried to intervene.
The Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights issued a report concluding that the atrocities meet the legal standard of genocide, adding that it is “a repeat genocide, and a repeat failure.”
“The international community has completely abandoned the non-Arab communities of Darfur facing an ongoing genocide,” said Yonah Diamond, senior legal counsel to the Wallenberg Center.
And the global response? The U.N. Security Council has passed a pair of pathetic resolutions calling for a cease-fire, most recently merely for the month of Ramadan. This week, the U.S. sanctioned two Rapid Support Forces commanders for their actions in Darfur, a move that is welcome but far from enough. It’s appalling that leading countries not only can’t muster significant action, they also can’t even manage a significant statement.
What we can do is push, as was done two decades ago, for a much greater effort to end the civil war in Sudan. That means an arms embargo and firm pressure on countries like the United Arab Emirates that (despite its denials) appear to be fueling the war with weapons shipments to the Rapid Support Forces. A U.N. report cites evidence of cargo flights several times each week carrying weapons from the U.A.E. to the Rapid Support Forces via Chad.
Sports figures, business leaders and celebrities visiting the U.A.E. should question why it chooses to provide weapons used for mass atrocities.
Leading countries can also impose sanctions on Sudanese figures and press the African Union and the African members of the Security Council to show leadership. A Security Council visit to the border with Chad would highlight the crisis, as would other high-level visits and statements.
“Darfur has been abandoned by everyone,” said Tirana Hassan, the executive director of Human Rights Watch.
So, in impoverished Darfur, the vow after every genocide of “never again” risks becoming “one more time.”
More on Darfur
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
U.N. Humanitarian Chief: World Leaders Are Failing Us
By Martin Griffiths
Mr. Griffiths has served as the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs at the United Nations since May 2021.
I have spent much of my career in or on the edges of war zones, but nothing quite prepared me for the breadth and depth of human suffering I have witnessed in my three years as the United Nations’ humanitarian chief.
The early months of my tenure were consumed with the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, and the effort to get more than a trickle of food and other aid to some five million people who had been cut off from the outside world by brutal fighting.
Then, in February 2022, came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the tanks rolling toward Kyiv; reports of summary executions and sexual violence in towns and villages; the brutal fighting in the east and south of the country that has forced millions of people from their homes; and the relentless attacks on apartment buildings, schools, hospitals and energy infrastructure that continue to this day. Tremors were felt around the world as food prices rose and geopolitical tensions deepened.
Just over a year later, the atrocious conflict in Sudan broke out. As two generals have battled for power, thousands have been killed, millions displaced, and ethnic-based violence has once again emerged as famine looms.
And then came Hamas’s horrendous Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the ensuing bombardment of Gaza, which has turned the blockade-impoverished enclave into hell on earth. The Ministry of Health in Gaza says more than 37,000 people in Gaza have been killed, and almost the entire population has been forced from their homes, many of them multiple times. Getting humanitarian aid to a population on the verge of famine has been made almost impossible, while humanitarian and United Nations workers have been killed in unconscionable numbers.
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Millions of others across the world are suffering no less in long-running and unresolved conflicts that no longer make the headlines — in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Sahel, to name a few.
This is precisely the situation that the modern global order, created in the aftermath of World War II and embodied with heartfelt ambition in the United Nations Charter, was meant to prevent. The suffering of millions of people is clear evidence that we are failing.
At its heart, I do not believe this failure lies with the United Nations. After all, the body is only as good as the commitment, effort and resources that its members put in. For me, this is a failure of world leaders: They are failing humanity by breaking the compact between ordinary people and those in whom power is vested.
This is most evident in the leaders who, with such callous disregard for the consequences on their own people and others, remorselessly reach for the gun instead of pursuing diplomatic solutions. It is particularly egregious when it is permanent members of the Security Council, the United Nations body charged with maintaining international peace and security, who betray their solemn duties in this way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an act in violation of the United Nations Charter, is a clear example.
The failure of leadership is also evident in some nations’ almost unconditional wartime support provided to their allies, despite abundant evidence that it’s enabling widespread suffering and potential breaches of international humanitarian law. You can particularly see this in Gaza, where civilian lives and infrastructure are experiencing excessive harm. You can also see it in the obstruction and politicization of humanitarian assistance, while hunger and disease spread and humanitarian workers, health care workers, and journalists have all endured unacceptable losses. Just look at the weapons that have continued to flow to Israel from the United States and many other countries, despite the obviously appalling impact of the war on civilians.
It is evident in leaders’ failure to hold to account, and even in efforts to undermine accountability, those who breach the U.N. Charter and international law, emboldening those for whom our rules and norms are mere obstacles to their greed for power and resources.
And in my world, these failures are particularly evident in the fact that every year, international funding for humanitarian relief reaches nowhere near the amount required, while individual nations’ military spending increases. In 2023, the world’s collective military expenditure rose to $2.4 trillion, while the United Nations and other aid organizations scraped together just $24 billion for humanitarian assistance, a mere 43 percent of the amount required to meet the most urgent needs of hundreds of millions of people.
Nevertheless, I still have hope.
Despite the many inadequacies of world leadership, I have also seen ample evidence in the last three years, and throughout my career, that humanity, compassion and people’s determination and desire to help one another still burn strong. I have seen this across many world crises, in the host communities who share the little they have with people fleeing conflict and hardship, often for months and years on end; in the spontaneous mobilization of local and national groups who support their communities in times of crisis, such as Sudan’s youth-led Emergency Response Rooms that rallied to provide medical, engineering and other emergency support; and in the courageous efforts of humanitarian workers across the globe.
Throughout my seven tours of duty with the United Nations, I have seen the unique capability and can-do spirit of this body and its personnel to take on and manage unbelievably complex and demanding situations, and to secure solutions to seemingly intractable problems, when empowered to do so. It was this spirit that in 2022 drove my efforts to secure the Black Sea Grain Initiative, an agreement brokered by the United Nations and Turkey that allowed for vast amounts of grain to finally be exported from Ukraine after months of being blocked. This demonstrated that even bitter enemies locked in conflict could agree to mitigate the war’s impact on the food security of millions around the world.
It drove me in tough negotiations with President Bashar al-Assad to allow aid into northwest Syria following the devastating February 2023 earthquakes, and to push for the warring generals in Sudan to agree to a Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan, eventually paving the way for some aid to start flowing back into the country. All this shows the power of what we now call humanitarian mediation.
If we are to have any hope for a better, more peaceful, more equitable future, we need world leaders who unite us, rather than continue to seek ways to divide us. We need leaders who are able and willing to harness our collective humanity, reinvigorate our trust in our common laws, norms and institutions and who have the vision and drive to deliver on the immense hope and ambition of the U.N. Charter.
As I prepare to step down after three years as the head of the U.N.’s humanitarian efforts, this is my appeal to leaders on behalf of the humanitarian community and all the people whom we serve: Set aside narrow interests, division and conflict. Put humanity, cooperation and people’s hopes for a better, more equal world, back at the center of international relations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
By Martin Griffiths
Mr. Griffiths has served as the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs at the United Nations since May 2021.
I have spent much of my career in or on the edges of war zones, but nothing quite prepared me for the breadth and depth of human suffering I have witnessed in my three years as the United Nations’ humanitarian chief.
The early months of my tenure were consumed with the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, and the effort to get more than a trickle of food and other aid to some five million people who had been cut off from the outside world by brutal fighting.
Then, in February 2022, came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the tanks rolling toward Kyiv; reports of summary executions and sexual violence in towns and villages; the brutal fighting in the east and south of the country that has forced millions of people from their homes; and the relentless attacks on apartment buildings, schools, hospitals and energy infrastructure that continue to this day. Tremors were felt around the world as food prices rose and geopolitical tensions deepened.
Just over a year later, the atrocious conflict in Sudan broke out. As two generals have battled for power, thousands have been killed, millions displaced, and ethnic-based violence has once again emerged as famine looms.
And then came Hamas’s horrendous Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the ensuing bombardment of Gaza, which has turned the blockade-impoverished enclave into hell on earth. The Ministry of Health in Gaza says more than 37,000 people in Gaza have been killed, and almost the entire population has been forced from their homes, many of them multiple times. Getting humanitarian aid to a population on the verge of famine has been made almost impossible, while humanitarian and United Nations workers have been killed in unconscionable numbers.
Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing. The latest news about the conflict. Get it sent to your inbox.
Millions of others across the world are suffering no less in long-running and unresolved conflicts that no longer make the headlines — in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Sahel, to name a few.
This is precisely the situation that the modern global order, created in the aftermath of World War II and embodied with heartfelt ambition in the United Nations Charter, was meant to prevent. The suffering of millions of people is clear evidence that we are failing.
At its heart, I do not believe this failure lies with the United Nations. After all, the body is only as good as the commitment, effort and resources that its members put in. For me, this is a failure of world leaders: They are failing humanity by breaking the compact between ordinary people and those in whom power is vested.
This is most evident in the leaders who, with such callous disregard for the consequences on their own people and others, remorselessly reach for the gun instead of pursuing diplomatic solutions. It is particularly egregious when it is permanent members of the Security Council, the United Nations body charged with maintaining international peace and security, who betray their solemn duties in this way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an act in violation of the United Nations Charter, is a clear example.
The failure of leadership is also evident in some nations’ almost unconditional wartime support provided to their allies, despite abundant evidence that it’s enabling widespread suffering and potential breaches of international humanitarian law. You can particularly see this in Gaza, where civilian lives and infrastructure are experiencing excessive harm. You can also see it in the obstruction and politicization of humanitarian assistance, while hunger and disease spread and humanitarian workers, health care workers, and journalists have all endured unacceptable losses. Just look at the weapons that have continued to flow to Israel from the United States and many other countries, despite the obviously appalling impact of the war on civilians.
It is evident in leaders’ failure to hold to account, and even in efforts to undermine accountability, those who breach the U.N. Charter and international law, emboldening those for whom our rules and norms are mere obstacles to their greed for power and resources.
And in my world, these failures are particularly evident in the fact that every year, international funding for humanitarian relief reaches nowhere near the amount required, while individual nations’ military spending increases. In 2023, the world’s collective military expenditure rose to $2.4 trillion, while the United Nations and other aid organizations scraped together just $24 billion for humanitarian assistance, a mere 43 percent of the amount required to meet the most urgent needs of hundreds of millions of people.
Nevertheless, I still have hope.
Despite the many inadequacies of world leadership, I have also seen ample evidence in the last three years, and throughout my career, that humanity, compassion and people’s determination and desire to help one another still burn strong. I have seen this across many world crises, in the host communities who share the little they have with people fleeing conflict and hardship, often for months and years on end; in the spontaneous mobilization of local and national groups who support their communities in times of crisis, such as Sudan’s youth-led Emergency Response Rooms that rallied to provide medical, engineering and other emergency support; and in the courageous efforts of humanitarian workers across the globe.
Throughout my seven tours of duty with the United Nations, I have seen the unique capability and can-do spirit of this body and its personnel to take on and manage unbelievably complex and demanding situations, and to secure solutions to seemingly intractable problems, when empowered to do so. It was this spirit that in 2022 drove my efforts to secure the Black Sea Grain Initiative, an agreement brokered by the United Nations and Turkey that allowed for vast amounts of grain to finally be exported from Ukraine after months of being blocked. This demonstrated that even bitter enemies locked in conflict could agree to mitigate the war’s impact on the food security of millions around the world.
It drove me in tough negotiations with President Bashar al-Assad to allow aid into northwest Syria following the devastating February 2023 earthquakes, and to push for the warring generals in Sudan to agree to a Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan, eventually paving the way for some aid to start flowing back into the country. All this shows the power of what we now call humanitarian mediation.
If we are to have any hope for a better, more peaceful, more equitable future, we need world leaders who unite us, rather than continue to seek ways to divide us. We need leaders who are able and willing to harness our collective humanity, reinvigorate our trust in our common laws, norms and institutions and who have the vision and drive to deliver on the immense hope and ambition of the U.N. Charter.
As I prepare to step down after three years as the head of the U.N.’s humanitarian efforts, this is my appeal to leaders on behalf of the humanitarian community and all the people whom we serve: Set aside narrow interests, division and conflict. Put humanity, cooperation and people’s hopes for a better, more equal world, back at the center of international relations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
At Least 750,000 on Brink of Starvation and Death in Sudan, Experts Warn
A devastating civil war is pushing the country toward a full-blown famine, according to the international body that measures hunger.
A 20-month-old, Bara’a Ahmed, being treated in the malnutrition unit at a hospital in Port Sudan in April. Conditions have worsened sharply since last year, a global body says.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Declan Walsh
By Declan Walsh
Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya
June 27, 2024
At least 750,000 people are on the brink of starvation and death in Sudan, where a devastating civil war has left over half the country’s 48 million people in a situation of chronic hunger, the global authority on famine said on Thursday.
At least 14 areas across the country are near famine, including some in the capital, Khartoum, according to the latest figures from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a group of experts from U.N. bodies and major relief agencies that measures hunger and formally declares famine.
The dire update appeared to confirm warnings from aid experts that Sudan is hurtling toward a humanitarian disaster on a scale not seen in decades.
“This is possibly the crisis of a generation,” said Edouard Rodier, Europe director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, who was in western Sudan last week. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
In a report issued on Thursday, the group said that 25.6 million Sudanese, or over half the population, were in a food crisis. Of them, 8.5 million are acutely malnourished or scrambling to survive while 755,000 are in a “catastrophe” — essentially, famine conditions.
When the group, known as the I.P.C., last issued estimates for Sudan in December, the number of people facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity was zero. The latest figures exceed even those of Gaza, where the group said on Tuesday that 495,000 people were in the same situation.
A War on the Nile Pushes Sudan Toward the Abyss
A year of fighting has turned the once proud capital, Khartoum, into a charred battleground. Millions have fled. Now a famine threatens in one of Africa’s biggest countries. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/worl ... latedLinks
June 5, 2024
Even so, the group has not formally declared a famine in Sudan, in part because reliable data is hard to obtain. Sudan’s health system is collapsing and aid workers cannot reach the worst-affected areas because of intense fighting and restrictions imposed by the warring parties.
Still, few experts doubt that mass death is already underway, and that the situation is likely to rapidly deteriorate in the coming months. Already in February, a senior U.N. official warned the Security Council that 222,000 Sudanese children could die in the following months.
A more recent study by the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch research group, estimated that up to 2.5 million people could die from hunger-related causes in Sudan by October.
“We may not see a famine declaration, but there’s no question that the starvation crisis is on a scale without parallel for 40 years or more, and is going to kill hundreds of thousands of Sudanese,” Alex de Waal, a famine scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, told The Horn podcast this week.
Since fighting broke out in April 2023 at least nine million Sudanese have been scattered from their homes. As many as 150,000 may have died, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, has estimated, although he adds that accurate figures are impossible to obtain.
Image
Two people next to a large cooking pot over an improvised fire outside.
Residents returning to a part of the capital, Khartoum, that saw fierce fighting in April, made lentils to distribute to other families.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
The areas where the famine threat is highest include the western region of Darfur, where the siege of a major city has brought fears of a massacre; the capital, Khartoum; and the country’s breadbasket in Jazeera State, the I.P.C. said.
The map locates the country of Sudan in northeastern Africa. It also locates Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and Jazeera State, southeast of Khartoum. The western Sudanese region of Darfur is also indicated.
EGYPT
LIBYA
Port
Sudan
Nile
SUDAN
CHAD
Omdurman
ERITREA
Khartoum
DARFUR
JAZEERA
ETHIOPIA
SOUTH
SUDAN
250 MILES
By The New York Times
“This is the single largest humanitarian crisis on the planet,” Samantha Power, the head of USAID, told reporters on June 14.
Ms. Power and other American officials have repeatedly accused the war’s belligerents — Sudan’s national military and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces — of using starvation as a weapon of war.
Foreign sponsors fueling the fighting have also come under scrutiny, in particular the United Arab Emirates, which backs the Rapid Support Forces, and Iran, which has supplied drones to the military. The Emirates has also donated $100 million in aid to Sudan, a gift it described as its commitment to a “peaceful resolution” of the war.
Yet despite the scale of the unfolding crisis, Sudan’s war has failed to attract the kind of top-level attention that was lavished on the Darfur crisis two decades ago, when Sudan became a major focus for both the White House and celebrities like the movie star George Clooney.
The United Nations says it has received 17 percent of the $2.7 billion it has requested for Sudan.
“World leaders continue to go through the motions, expressing concern over Sudan’s crisis,” said Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the head of Mercy Corps, a global aid organization. “Yet they’ve failed to rise to the occasion.”
Image
A cream-colored building viewed through a ragged hole in masonry.
A blast hole in the wall of a hospital in Omdurman, in April.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan. More about Declan Walsh
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/worl ... ation.html
A devastating civil war is pushing the country toward a full-blown famine, according to the international body that measures hunger.
A 20-month-old, Bara’a Ahmed, being treated in the malnutrition unit at a hospital in Port Sudan in April. Conditions have worsened sharply since last year, a global body says.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Declan Walsh
By Declan Walsh
Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya
June 27, 2024
At least 750,000 people are on the brink of starvation and death in Sudan, where a devastating civil war has left over half the country’s 48 million people in a situation of chronic hunger, the global authority on famine said on Thursday.
At least 14 areas across the country are near famine, including some in the capital, Khartoum, according to the latest figures from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a group of experts from U.N. bodies and major relief agencies that measures hunger and formally declares famine.
The dire update appeared to confirm warnings from aid experts that Sudan is hurtling toward a humanitarian disaster on a scale not seen in decades.
“This is possibly the crisis of a generation,” said Edouard Rodier, Europe director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, who was in western Sudan last week. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
In a report issued on Thursday, the group said that 25.6 million Sudanese, or over half the population, were in a food crisis. Of them, 8.5 million are acutely malnourished or scrambling to survive while 755,000 are in a “catastrophe” — essentially, famine conditions.
When the group, known as the I.P.C., last issued estimates for Sudan in December, the number of people facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity was zero. The latest figures exceed even those of Gaza, where the group said on Tuesday that 495,000 people were in the same situation.
A War on the Nile Pushes Sudan Toward the Abyss
A year of fighting has turned the once proud capital, Khartoum, into a charred battleground. Millions have fled. Now a famine threatens in one of Africa’s biggest countries. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/worl ... latedLinks
June 5, 2024
Even so, the group has not formally declared a famine in Sudan, in part because reliable data is hard to obtain. Sudan’s health system is collapsing and aid workers cannot reach the worst-affected areas because of intense fighting and restrictions imposed by the warring parties.
Still, few experts doubt that mass death is already underway, and that the situation is likely to rapidly deteriorate in the coming months. Already in February, a senior U.N. official warned the Security Council that 222,000 Sudanese children could die in the following months.
A more recent study by the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch research group, estimated that up to 2.5 million people could die from hunger-related causes in Sudan by October.
“We may not see a famine declaration, but there’s no question that the starvation crisis is on a scale without parallel for 40 years or more, and is going to kill hundreds of thousands of Sudanese,” Alex de Waal, a famine scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, told The Horn podcast this week.
Since fighting broke out in April 2023 at least nine million Sudanese have been scattered from their homes. As many as 150,000 may have died, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, has estimated, although he adds that accurate figures are impossible to obtain.
Image
Two people next to a large cooking pot over an improvised fire outside.
Residents returning to a part of the capital, Khartoum, that saw fierce fighting in April, made lentils to distribute to other families.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
The areas where the famine threat is highest include the western region of Darfur, where the siege of a major city has brought fears of a massacre; the capital, Khartoum; and the country’s breadbasket in Jazeera State, the I.P.C. said.
The map locates the country of Sudan in northeastern Africa. It also locates Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and Jazeera State, southeast of Khartoum. The western Sudanese region of Darfur is also indicated.
EGYPT
LIBYA
Port
Sudan
Nile
SUDAN
CHAD
Omdurman
ERITREA
Khartoum
DARFUR
JAZEERA
ETHIOPIA
SOUTH
SUDAN
250 MILES
By The New York Times
“This is the single largest humanitarian crisis on the planet,” Samantha Power, the head of USAID, told reporters on June 14.
Ms. Power and other American officials have repeatedly accused the war’s belligerents — Sudan’s national military and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces — of using starvation as a weapon of war.
Foreign sponsors fueling the fighting have also come under scrutiny, in particular the United Arab Emirates, which backs the Rapid Support Forces, and Iran, which has supplied drones to the military. The Emirates has also donated $100 million in aid to Sudan, a gift it described as its commitment to a “peaceful resolution” of the war.
Yet despite the scale of the unfolding crisis, Sudan’s war has failed to attract the kind of top-level attention that was lavished on the Darfur crisis two decades ago, when Sudan became a major focus for both the White House and celebrities like the movie star George Clooney.
The United Nations says it has received 17 percent of the $2.7 billion it has requested for Sudan.
“World leaders continue to go through the motions, expressing concern over Sudan’s crisis,” said Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the head of Mercy Corps, a global aid organization. “Yet they’ve failed to rise to the occasion.”
Image
A cream-colored building viewed through a ragged hole in masonry.
A blast hole in the wall of a hospital in Omdurman, in April.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan. More about Declan Walsh
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/worl ... ation.html
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
CNN
‘Anyone who fell did not get up’: Survivors recall chaos and confusion at deadly crush in India
Aishwarya Iyer, Esha Mitra and Sophie Tanno and Rhea Mogul, CNN
Wed, July 3, 2024 at 9:14 PM CDT·
Eyewitnesses have recounted scenes of chaos and confusion after a religious festival in northern India ended in tragedy when scores of people were killed in a crowd crush.
At least 121 people died – almost all of them women – and 35 others were injured when overcrowding at a sermon in Mughal Garhi village in Uttar Pradesh led to the deadly crush on Tuesday. Police said they were investigating the organizers, saying a quarter of a million people arrived at the venue – more than three times the number expected – and just a few dozen police officers had been deployed.
The crush happened as female devotees rushed toward the stage to touch the feet of Bhole Baba, the self-styled godman, or guru, who led the event, according to Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister. Other officials said devotees were trying to collect ground that his car had passed over as he left the ceremony.
Speaking to CNN from a local hospital, security guard Subhash Lal said his mother had died in the crush and blamed “carelessness” for the tragedy.
“My mother’s dead body is here (at this hospital)… The most pain you can feel is for a mother, everyone knows that,” he said.
“If there was no carelessness then people would not have died like this, whether it’s the administration or organizers, it’s carelessness.”
The mother of a victim who gave her name as Kamala told Reuters: “My daughter was alright when she arrived at the hospital. In fact, my daughter served water to other victims, helped them and called my brother informing us that she had made it to the hospital safely. But by the time my brother reached the hospital, my daughter was dead.”
Describing the chaos at the gathering, a survivor named Rekha told Reuters the crush occurred after the preaching had ended, saying: “Anyone who fell did not get up, was trampled by the crowd and died.”
Chedilal, a 65-year-old man whose 30-year-old daughter was killed in the crush, said: “We were together. I saw many dead bodies lying there so I ran to where the buses were parked.
“I looked for her everywhere but I could not find her anywhere, it became night. Where could I go? What could I do?
“I was told to go to the district hospital and here I found her body.”
Questions raised
Tuesday’s incident, the latest in a string of similar tragedies, has highlighted glaring gaps in the country’s safety measures at such events as police investigate allegations of negligence and remain on the hunt for Bhole Baba, also known as Suraj Pal.
Some 250,000 people were at the event, despite authorities giving permission for a gathering of 80,000, a police report seen by CNN shows.
The report also alleged that event organizers gave no assistance to the injured and attempted to cover up the incident by hiding clothes and shoes that people had lost in the crush in a nearby field.
Police have accused the event’s organizers of culpable homicide not amounting to murder, wrongfully restraining a person, causing disappearance of evidence or providing false information, the report said.
CNN has attempted to contact the organizers for a response.
Uttar Pradesh has launched a special investigative team to probe the deadly crush, the state’s chief minister announced on Wednesday.
A judicial inquiry will also be carried out under the state’s high court, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said.
Adityanath suggested the organizers were to blame, telling reporters “the administration assumes that at such a function, internally, the security of devotees would be managed by the organizers.”
“For security, the administration deploys its force as well, but in the outer ring. Inside it is the organizers managing everything,” he said.
In a statement he shared via his lawyer, Bhole Baba offered condolences to the families of those killed as he blamed the fatal crush on “anti-social elements.”
Questions have been raised over gaps in the safety protocols in place at Tuesday’s event, prompting authorities to launch a high-level investigation and lawyers to file a public interest litigation in Allahabad High Court, demanding an inquiry into the deaths.
Crowd crushes at religious gatherings in India, the world’s most populous country of 1.4 billion, are not uncommon owing to the lack of strict crowd control measures.
In January 2005, more than 265 Hindu devotees were killed and hundreds more injured at a temple in the western state of Maharashtra – one of the deadliest such incidents in the country’s recent history. Three years later, about 145 Hindu pilgrims died on a mountaintop temple in northern India after rumors of a landslide triggered a crowd crush, Reuters reported.
The public interest litigation also pointed to two other events in 2011 and 2013, where more than 100 people were trampled to death at two separate Hindu religious events.
“The administration must learn and must adapt the preventative measures after witnessing of earlier incidents… but they have no regard for the life of the general public,” the court document said.
Opposition politicians have also raised concerns over Tuesday’s incident.
“It’s very unfortunate,” said Renuka Chowdhury, a lawmaker from India’s largest opposition party, the Indian National Congress.
“Incidents like this shouldn’t happen again,” she told Indian news agency ANI. “We should examine our conscience, and see where we can control, guide and monitor the crowd.”
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/an ... 11922.html
‘Anyone who fell did not get up’: Survivors recall chaos and confusion at deadly crush in India
Aishwarya Iyer, Esha Mitra and Sophie Tanno and Rhea Mogul, CNN
Wed, July 3, 2024 at 9:14 PM CDT·
Eyewitnesses have recounted scenes of chaos and confusion after a religious festival in northern India ended in tragedy when scores of people were killed in a crowd crush.
At least 121 people died – almost all of them women – and 35 others were injured when overcrowding at a sermon in Mughal Garhi village in Uttar Pradesh led to the deadly crush on Tuesday. Police said they were investigating the organizers, saying a quarter of a million people arrived at the venue – more than three times the number expected – and just a few dozen police officers had been deployed.
The crush happened as female devotees rushed toward the stage to touch the feet of Bhole Baba, the self-styled godman, or guru, who led the event, according to Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister. Other officials said devotees were trying to collect ground that his car had passed over as he left the ceremony.
Speaking to CNN from a local hospital, security guard Subhash Lal said his mother had died in the crush and blamed “carelessness” for the tragedy.
“My mother’s dead body is here (at this hospital)… The most pain you can feel is for a mother, everyone knows that,” he said.
“If there was no carelessness then people would not have died like this, whether it’s the administration or organizers, it’s carelessness.”
The mother of a victim who gave her name as Kamala told Reuters: “My daughter was alright when she arrived at the hospital. In fact, my daughter served water to other victims, helped them and called my brother informing us that she had made it to the hospital safely. But by the time my brother reached the hospital, my daughter was dead.”
Describing the chaos at the gathering, a survivor named Rekha told Reuters the crush occurred after the preaching had ended, saying: “Anyone who fell did not get up, was trampled by the crowd and died.”
Chedilal, a 65-year-old man whose 30-year-old daughter was killed in the crush, said: “We were together. I saw many dead bodies lying there so I ran to where the buses were parked.
“I looked for her everywhere but I could not find her anywhere, it became night. Where could I go? What could I do?
“I was told to go to the district hospital and here I found her body.”
Questions raised
Tuesday’s incident, the latest in a string of similar tragedies, has highlighted glaring gaps in the country’s safety measures at such events as police investigate allegations of negligence and remain on the hunt for Bhole Baba, also known as Suraj Pal.
Some 250,000 people were at the event, despite authorities giving permission for a gathering of 80,000, a police report seen by CNN shows.
The report also alleged that event organizers gave no assistance to the injured and attempted to cover up the incident by hiding clothes and shoes that people had lost in the crush in a nearby field.
Police have accused the event’s organizers of culpable homicide not amounting to murder, wrongfully restraining a person, causing disappearance of evidence or providing false information, the report said.
CNN has attempted to contact the organizers for a response.
Uttar Pradesh has launched a special investigative team to probe the deadly crush, the state’s chief minister announced on Wednesday.
A judicial inquiry will also be carried out under the state’s high court, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said.
Adityanath suggested the organizers were to blame, telling reporters “the administration assumes that at such a function, internally, the security of devotees would be managed by the organizers.”
“For security, the administration deploys its force as well, but in the outer ring. Inside it is the organizers managing everything,” he said.
In a statement he shared via his lawyer, Bhole Baba offered condolences to the families of those killed as he blamed the fatal crush on “anti-social elements.”
Questions have been raised over gaps in the safety protocols in place at Tuesday’s event, prompting authorities to launch a high-level investigation and lawyers to file a public interest litigation in Allahabad High Court, demanding an inquiry into the deaths.
Crowd crushes at religious gatherings in India, the world’s most populous country of 1.4 billion, are not uncommon owing to the lack of strict crowd control measures.
In January 2005, more than 265 Hindu devotees were killed and hundreds more injured at a temple in the western state of Maharashtra – one of the deadliest such incidents in the country’s recent history. Three years later, about 145 Hindu pilgrims died on a mountaintop temple in northern India after rumors of a landslide triggered a crowd crush, Reuters reported.
The public interest litigation also pointed to two other events in 2011 and 2013, where more than 100 people were trampled to death at two separate Hindu religious events.
“The administration must learn and must adapt the preventative measures after witnessing of earlier incidents… but they have no regard for the life of the general public,” the court document said.
Opposition politicians have also raised concerns over Tuesday’s incident.
“It’s very unfortunate,” said Renuka Chowdhury, a lawmaker from India’s largest opposition party, the Indian National Congress.
“Incidents like this shouldn’t happen again,” she told Indian news agency ANI. “We should examine our conscience, and see where we can control, guide and monitor the crowd.”
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/an ... 11922.html
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Congo’s ‘Other’ Conflict Kills Thousands in West Near the Capital
Overshadowed by fighting in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a dispute in the west between two ethnic groups has resulted in thousands of civilians killed and more than 550,000 displaced near the capital, Kinshasa.
Elian Peltier
By Elian Peltier
Reporting from Dakar, Senegal
July 19, 2024, 8:09 a.m. ET
A little-known conflict in the west of the Democratic Republic of Congo is raging close to the country’s capital, Kinshasa, one of the largest cities in Africa.
Nine soldiers and 70 militiamen died in clashes on July 13 in Kinsele, a village 80 miles east of Kinshasa, according to the local authorities. It was the latest surge of violence in an area where thousands of civilians have been killed and more than 550,000 displaced since 2022, according to estimates from humanitarian organizations and United Nations agencies.
The initial spark for the conflict two years ago was a tax dispute between local ethnic groups, the Teke and the Yaka. It has since billowed into a fight over land access, with a bloody trail of summary executions, burned villages and sexual violence.
A militia pretending to defend some of the communities in the area has enlisted child soldiers, forced women to marry their fighters and looted villagers’ crops, sending people fleeing toward Kinshasa, humanitarian groups and U.N. experts say.
This conflict is unfolding 900 miles away from a larger crisis that has plagued eastern Congo for the past three decades, killing about six million people and displacing 60 million others.
The Overlooked Crisis in Congo: ‘We Live in War’ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/worl ... latedLinks
Six million have died, and more than six million are displaced after decades of fighting and the ensuing humanitarian crisis in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, drawing in neighbors, mercenaries and militias. An upcoming election is inflaming tempers.
Dec. 17, 2023
From tax dispute to interethnic violence
For decades, two main ethnic groups in the western Congo region, the Teke and the Yaka, lived in relative peace in the Mai-Ndombe province under a mutually-agreed rule: the Yaka rented land from the Teke, considered the customary landowners, by paying a tax on the crop they cultivated, regional experts said.
When Teke chiefs increased the tax in 2022, the Yaka refused to pay. One heated confrontation led to another, and soon farmers, mostly from the Yaka community, were forcing Teke villagers off their lands, according to human rights organizations and U.N. experts.
“There’s now a lot of mistrust between populations who used to live together,” said Liliane Bitong Ambassa, head of the Congo mission for Caritas International Belgium.
A militia, mostly made up of recruits from the Yaka community as well as others from ethnic groups including the Suku, Mbala and Songo, emerged in 2022 and grew throughout last year into a ruthless force. Their fighters wield military-style weapons and have seized dozens of villages in the provinces of neighboring Kinshasa.
Image
A large, sprawling city seen from the air.
For now, the violence isn’t directly threatening Kinshasa, a sprawling metropolis of more than 15 million people.Credit...Alexis Huguet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The attackers who targeted Congolese soldiers in the village of Kinsele last Saturday were from that militia, known as the Mobondo. No civilians were killed: they had fled days earlier after a first assault by Mobondo fighters, according to local officials.
“Surrounding villages are also emptying themselves because villagers fear that they’re next in line,” David Bissaka, a local representative, said in a telephone interview.
Militiamen sent to Congo’s east
The initial crisis in one community has now grown into a war plaguing four provinces.
Mobondo fighters now control large swathes of land, making aid access difficult. The Mobondo also ambush traders and seize crops to feed their fighters or finance their war effort, according to human rights groups and local news reports.
They have also tortured local residents and kidnapped them for ransom, according to the United Nations. A report by Caritas and local religious organizations last year highlighted cases of forced recruitment of young men, including minors, rape, sexual slavery and executions — “often by beheading.” Congolese soldiers also force women to marry them, according to Caritas.
“Getting a clear picture of the number of deaths and displacements is a real challenge,” said Ms. Bitong Ambassa, of Caritas. “But in every village we visit, we hear about deaths, deaths, deaths.”
The Congolese military and police still control the main roads in the region, but Mobondo fighters run military outposts in the villages they’ve seized, according to U.N. experts and humanitarian organizations.
To quell the violence, the Congolese military has conscripted about 1,000 of those involved in the conflict, including fighters from the Mobondo militia, according to U.N. experts.
They have been sent to north Kivu, at the opposite end of the country in the east, to fight the M23, a rebel group seeking to control the regional capital. The Congolese government, the United Nations and the United States say M23 is backed by neighboring Rwanda, which that country denies.
Fragile peace agreement
In April, leaders from the Teke and Yaka communities signed a peace agreement in front of the Congolese president, Felix Tshisekedi. But the agreement has yet to be made public, and Mobondo fighters attacked a village just days after the warring parties signed it.
Image
A close-up of the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo in a suit
President Felix Tshisekedi of Democratic Republic of Congo.Credit...Christophe Ena/Associated Press
Then came the attack on soldiers last Saturday.
“What do they want? We don’t know,” Mr. Bissaka, the local representative, said about the militiamen.
The conflict has created a displacement and food crisis as 80 percent of fields in the conflict areas aren’t accessible, according to Caritas.
For now, the violence is not directly threatening Kinshasa, a sprawling metropolis of more than 15 million people.
But thousands of those displaced have found refuge in the capital, according to OCHA, the U.N. humanitarian agency.
“This crisis is overshadowed by the other crisis in the east,” said Ms. Bitong Ambassa. “But in some courtyards of Kinshasa, you’ll find 100, 200 people who have fled the violence from these areas.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Overshadowed by fighting in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a dispute in the west between two ethnic groups has resulted in thousands of civilians killed and more than 550,000 displaced near the capital, Kinshasa.
Elian Peltier
By Elian Peltier
Reporting from Dakar, Senegal
July 19, 2024, 8:09 a.m. ET
A little-known conflict in the west of the Democratic Republic of Congo is raging close to the country’s capital, Kinshasa, one of the largest cities in Africa.
Nine soldiers and 70 militiamen died in clashes on July 13 in Kinsele, a village 80 miles east of Kinshasa, according to the local authorities. It was the latest surge of violence in an area where thousands of civilians have been killed and more than 550,000 displaced since 2022, according to estimates from humanitarian organizations and United Nations agencies.
The initial spark for the conflict two years ago was a tax dispute between local ethnic groups, the Teke and the Yaka. It has since billowed into a fight over land access, with a bloody trail of summary executions, burned villages and sexual violence.
A militia pretending to defend some of the communities in the area has enlisted child soldiers, forced women to marry their fighters and looted villagers’ crops, sending people fleeing toward Kinshasa, humanitarian groups and U.N. experts say.
This conflict is unfolding 900 miles away from a larger crisis that has plagued eastern Congo for the past three decades, killing about six million people and displacing 60 million others.
The Overlooked Crisis in Congo: ‘We Live in War’ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/worl ... latedLinks
Six million have died, and more than six million are displaced after decades of fighting and the ensuing humanitarian crisis in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, drawing in neighbors, mercenaries and militias. An upcoming election is inflaming tempers.
Dec. 17, 2023
From tax dispute to interethnic violence
For decades, two main ethnic groups in the western Congo region, the Teke and the Yaka, lived in relative peace in the Mai-Ndombe province under a mutually-agreed rule: the Yaka rented land from the Teke, considered the customary landowners, by paying a tax on the crop they cultivated, regional experts said.
When Teke chiefs increased the tax in 2022, the Yaka refused to pay. One heated confrontation led to another, and soon farmers, mostly from the Yaka community, were forcing Teke villagers off their lands, according to human rights organizations and U.N. experts.
“There’s now a lot of mistrust between populations who used to live together,” said Liliane Bitong Ambassa, head of the Congo mission for Caritas International Belgium.
A militia, mostly made up of recruits from the Yaka community as well as others from ethnic groups including the Suku, Mbala and Songo, emerged in 2022 and grew throughout last year into a ruthless force. Their fighters wield military-style weapons and have seized dozens of villages in the provinces of neighboring Kinshasa.
Image
A large, sprawling city seen from the air.
For now, the violence isn’t directly threatening Kinshasa, a sprawling metropolis of more than 15 million people.Credit...Alexis Huguet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The attackers who targeted Congolese soldiers in the village of Kinsele last Saturday were from that militia, known as the Mobondo. No civilians were killed: they had fled days earlier after a first assault by Mobondo fighters, according to local officials.
“Surrounding villages are also emptying themselves because villagers fear that they’re next in line,” David Bissaka, a local representative, said in a telephone interview.
Militiamen sent to Congo’s east
The initial crisis in one community has now grown into a war plaguing four provinces.
Mobondo fighters now control large swathes of land, making aid access difficult. The Mobondo also ambush traders and seize crops to feed their fighters or finance their war effort, according to human rights groups and local news reports.
They have also tortured local residents and kidnapped them for ransom, according to the United Nations. A report by Caritas and local religious organizations last year highlighted cases of forced recruitment of young men, including minors, rape, sexual slavery and executions — “often by beheading.” Congolese soldiers also force women to marry them, according to Caritas.
“Getting a clear picture of the number of deaths and displacements is a real challenge,” said Ms. Bitong Ambassa, of Caritas. “But in every village we visit, we hear about deaths, deaths, deaths.”
The Congolese military and police still control the main roads in the region, but Mobondo fighters run military outposts in the villages they’ve seized, according to U.N. experts and humanitarian organizations.
To quell the violence, the Congolese military has conscripted about 1,000 of those involved in the conflict, including fighters from the Mobondo militia, according to U.N. experts.
They have been sent to north Kivu, at the opposite end of the country in the east, to fight the M23, a rebel group seeking to control the regional capital. The Congolese government, the United Nations and the United States say M23 is backed by neighboring Rwanda, which that country denies.
Fragile peace agreement
In April, leaders from the Teke and Yaka communities signed a peace agreement in front of the Congolese president, Felix Tshisekedi. But the agreement has yet to be made public, and Mobondo fighters attacked a village just days after the warring parties signed it.
Image
A close-up of the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo in a suit
President Felix Tshisekedi of Democratic Republic of Congo.Credit...Christophe Ena/Associated Press
Then came the attack on soldiers last Saturday.
“What do they want? We don’t know,” Mr. Bissaka, the local representative, said about the militiamen.
The conflict has created a displacement and food crisis as 80 percent of fields in the conflict areas aren’t accessible, according to Caritas.
For now, the violence is not directly threatening Kinshasa, a sprawling metropolis of more than 15 million people.
But thousands of those displaced have found refuge in the capital, according to OCHA, the U.N. humanitarian agency.
“This crisis is overshadowed by the other crisis in the east,” said Ms. Bitong Ambassa. “But in some courtyards of Kinshasa, you’ll find 100, 200 people who have fled the violence from these areas.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
As Starvation Spreads in Sudan, Military Blocks Aid Trucks at Border
A country torn apart by civil war could soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades, experts said.
Fleeing hunger and war, Sudanese families like Adam Omar Osman, his wife, Fatima Hassan, and their four children crossed from the Darfur region to a refugee camp in Chad this month.
July 26, 2024
As Sudan hurtles toward famine, its military is blocking the United Nations from bringing enormous amounts of food into the country through a vital border crossing, effectively cutting off aid to hundreds of thousands of starving people during the depths of a civil war.
Experts warn that Sudan, barely functioning after 15 months of fighting, could soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades. But the Sudanese military’s refusal to let U.N. aid convoys through the crossing is thwarting the kind of all-out relief effort that aid groups say is needed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths — as many as 2.5 million, according to one estimate — by the end of this year.
The risk is greatest in Darfur, the Spain-sized region that suffered a genocide two decades ago. Of the 14 Sudanese districts at immediate risk of famine, eight are in Darfur, right across the border that the United Nations is trying to cross. Time is running out to help them.
The closed border point, a subject of increasingly urgent appeals from American officials, is at Adré, the main crossing from Chad into Sudan. At the border, little more than a concrete bollard in a dried-out riverbed, just about everything seems to flow: refugees and traders, four-wheeled motorbikes carrying animal skins, and donkey carts laden with barrels of fuel.
What is forbidden from crossing into Sudan, however, are the U.N. trucks filled with food that are urgently needed in Darfur, where experts say that 440,000 people are already on the brink of starvation. Refugees fleeing Darfur now say that hunger, not conflict, is the main reason they left.
ImageA man in khaki stands with a coiled whip in his hand, in front of a crowd of children and adults looking up warily at him, some holding metal bowls.
A man with a whip tried to control a crowd of Sudanese refugees who were jostling to receive food during an impromptu aid distribution on the outskirts of Adré refugee camp.
Image
Rough tents spread over the horizon on a desert landscape under a cloud-filled sky.
Nearly 200,000 people squeeze into a single camp in Adré that sprawls into the surrounding desert. Shelter is scarce, and there is not enough food or water.
Image
A woman cooks over an open fire in front of tents made of tarps, next to several children.
Recently arrived refugees live in makeshift shelters in the camp.
A mother of three, Bahja Muhakar slumped with exhaustion under a tree after her family migrated into Chad at the Adré crossing. It had been a frightening six-day journey, from the besieged city of El Fasher, along roads where fighters threatened to kill them, she said. But the family felt they had little choice.
“We had nothing to eat,” Ms. Muhakar said, motioning to the children squatting beside her. She said they often subsisted on a single shared pancake per day.
The Sudanese military imposed the edict at the crossing five months ago, supposedly to prohibit weapons smuggling. It seems to make little sense. Arms, cash and fighters continue to flow into Sudan elsewhere on the 870-mile border that is mostly controlled by its enemy, a heavily armed paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F.
The military doesn’t even control the crossing at Adré, where R.S.F. fighters stand 100 yards behind the border on the Sudanese side.
A map of Sudan highlighting the Adre border crossing in Chad. It also features Tine, as well as El Geneina and El Fasher in the Darfur region.
LIBYA
EGYPT
200 MILES
SUDAN
Port Sudan
Red
Sea
CHAD
DARFUR
REGION
NIGER
Nile
Khartoum
Tine
El Fasher
Adré
El Geneina
NIGERIA
ETHIOPIA
SOUTH
SUDAN
CENTRAL AFRICAN
REPUBLIC
CAMEROON
Douala
By The New York Times
Even so, the U.N. says it must respect the order not to cross from the military, which is based in Port Sudan 1,000 miles to the east, because it is Sudan’s sovereign authority. Instead U.N. trucks are forced to make an arduous 200-mile detour north to Tine, at a crossing controlled by a militia allied with Sudan’s army, where they are allowed to enter Darfur.
The diversion is dangerous, expensive and takes up to five times as long as going through Adré. Only a fraction of the required aid is getting through Tine — 320 trucks of food since February, U.N. officials say, instead of the thousands that are needed. The Tine crossing was closed for most of this week after seasonal rains turned the border into a river.
Between February, when the Adré border crossing was shut, and June, the number of people facing emergency levels of hunger went from 1.7 million to seven million.
Image
One woman covering her head runs in rain, and another carries two water cans across muddy ground lined with huts made of sticks.
Heavy rain marked the start of the season in Adré camp.
Image
As the sun goes down, two men kneel on a mat, one with his arms raised in supplication.
At sunset, prayer at the Adré refugee camp in Chad.
Image
Drenched people huddle under a cart draped with a yellow plastic tarp.
Refugees who just fled territory in Darfur controlled by the Rapid Support Forces take shelter under a donkey cart and plastic sheeting at the camp in Chad.
As the prospect of mass starvation in Sudan draws closer, the Adré closure has become a central focus of efforts by the United States, by far the largest donor, to ramp up the emergency aid effort. “This obstruction is completely unacceptable,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., recently told reporters.
Getting aid into Darfur was difficult even before the war. Adré is roughly equidistant from the Atlantic to the west and the Red Sea to the east, about 1,100 miles as the crow flies in either direction. Roads are rutted, lined with bribe-seeking officials and prone to seasonal flooding. A truck leaving the port of Douala, on the west coast in Cameroon, takes nearly three months to reach the Sudanese border, one U.N. official said.
//A Massacre Threatens Darfur — Again https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... latedLinks
//Darfur, the region of Sudan once synonymous with genocide, may be on the brink of a new chapter of horror.
Blame for the looming famine is hardly limited to the military. The Rapid Support Forces also paved its path. Since the war started in April 2023, their fighters have scattered millions from their homes, burned factories that make baby food and looted aid convoys. They continue to rampage through Sudan’s breadbasket regions, which were among the most productive in Africa, causing massive food shortages.
And the international response to Sudan’s plight has largely been paltry, slow and lacking in urgency.
At a conference in Paris in April, donors pledged $2 billion in aid for Sudan, just half the requested amount, but those pledges have not been fully delivered. In the teeming refugee camps of eastern Chad, the lack of funds translates into desperate living conditions.
Image
Two-wheeled carts pulled by donkeys carry metal barrels of fuel, with drivers sitting atop.
Carts carrying gasoline are permitted to cross at Adré into Sudan. Porters say the fuel is used by the Rapid Support Forces.
In Adré, nearly 200,000 people squeeze into a single transit camp that sprawls into the surrounding desert. Latrines overflow. Shelter is scarce.
The U.N. refugee agency, which manages refugee camps in Chad, said its operations were 21 percent funded in June. The World Food Program was recently forced to cut rations because it lacked money.
As rain pelted down, Aisha Idriss, 22, huddled under a plastic sheet, gripping it tight against gusts of wind as she nursed her 4-month-old daughter. Her three other children squatted beside them.
“We sleep here,” she said, referring to the sodden ground.
Just three beds were empty in a malnutrition center run by Doctors Without Borders, filled with starving infants. The youngest was 33 days old, a girl whose mother had died in childbirth.
In the next bed lay Moaid Salah, a 20-month-old boy whose thinning hair and gaunt features were classic symptoms of malnutrition. He had arrived in Chad last November after gunmen stormed into his family’s home in El Geneina, across the border in Darfur, and killed his grandfather.
“They shot him in front of our eyes,” said Moaid’s mother, Dahabaya Ibet. Now their struggle was to survive on meager U.N. rations.
“Whatever we get, it isn’t enough,” she said, spooning formula into Maiad’s mouth.
Image
A baby lying on a hospital bed screams as his mother lays her hand on his chest and a doctor in a white jacket and gloves leans over the bed.
Manahil Khatar, 20, held her 5-month-old son, Ashuwak Ibrahim, at a malnutrition center run by Doctors Without Borders in Adré, where he was treated for an infected wound on his arm that stemmed from continuous intravenous treatment for malnourishment.
Image
Dahabaya Ibet and her gaunt 20-month-old son, Moaid Salah, at the malnutrition center.
Image
People lean over taps filling plastic jerrycans with water.
Camp residents filling water containers. They receive as little as six liters of water a day, one third of the recommended minimum.
The situation is much worse in Darfur, where just a handful of aid groups are still working with international staff. The U.N., which pulled out at the start of the war, works through local organizations. The World Food Program says it can reach just 10 percent of people in need.
In a survey released last week, Mercy Corps said that one quarter of children in central Darfur state were so malnourished that they could soon die.
Experts say that only the World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian organization with a budget of $8.5 billion last year, has the resources and expertise needed to ramp up an emergency operation at scale. But without unimpeded access to the border, providing aid is proving extremely challenging.
Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/07/25/121 ... _1080p.mp4
CreditCredit...
It takes trucks several extra days just to reach the border crossing at Tine. To cross into Sudan, trucks need permits issued by the authorities in Port Sudan that can take weeks to arrive, if they do at all, aid officials said.
In an interview, Sudan’s ambassador to the U.N., Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, defended the Adré closure, citing evidence collected by Sudanese intelligence of arms smuggling. He said the U.N. was “happy” with the arrangement of routing trucks north through the border at Tine.
He added that foreign countries predicting a famine in Sudan were relying on “old figures” and seeking a pretext “for international intervention.”
He said, “We have seen deliberate, meticulous politicization of humanitarian aid to Sudan from the donors.”
At the Adré crossing, the military’s inability to control anything entering Sudan is starkly apparent. Porters with donkey carts said they deliver hundreds of barrels of gasoline that are consumed by the R.S.F.’s four-wheel-drive vehicles, which are usually mounted with guns.
Image
Men playing on a field of uneven red earth run toward a white soccer ball.
Refugees playing soccer on the outskirts of Adré camp.
Image
A man having his hair trimmed sits in a chair in front of a mirror in a makeshift shelter made of sticks and tarps.
A barber trims hair in a makeshift shop in the Adré camp.
Image
Colorful clothing hung on a line between two sticks.
Men’s clothing for sale at the Adré camp.
And farther north, the R.S.F.’s powerful patron, the United Arab Emirates, continues to smuggle weapons and cash across the porous border, several western officials said.
The swelling crisis has brought recriminations inside the aid community. In private, aid workers and American officials say the U.N. leadership should be more forcefully urging the military to reopen the Adré crossing. Some wonder why the organization has not lined up trucks at the border, as it did in Gaza last year, to step up the pressure.
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Sudan did not respond to questions for this story.
//A War on the Nile Pushes Sudan Toward the Abyss https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/worl ... latedLinks
//A year of fighting has turned the once proud capital, Khartoum, into a charred battleground. Millions have fled. Now a famine threatens in one of //Africa’s biggest countries.
//June 5, 2024
In Washington, intelligence briefings provided to the State Department and White House have confirmed the stark projections, issued by aid groups, for mass famine-related deaths by the end of this year, said a senior American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
The coming famine is likely to be as deadly as the one in Somalia in 2011, the official said, and by the worst estimates could match the great Ethiopia famine of the 1980s.
To override the blockage at Adré, American officials including Ms. Thomas-Greenfield have called on the United Nations Security Council to permit U.N. trucks to cross at Adré without military authorization, as what happened earlier with cross-border aid into Syria. But analysts say that Russia, which recently offered arms to Sudan’s military, would be likely to veto such a resolution.
The other hope now is fresh cease-fire talks, announced this week and mediated by the United States, that are scheduled to start in Switzerland mid-August. In an interview, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, said he would be pressing both sides to allow full humanitarian access — if they even show up for the talks.
Image
A woman in purple walks past people sitting on the ground, some under tarps and sticks.
Recently arrived refugees gathered on the outskirts of Adré camp, while they waited to be registered and allocated space.
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3
A country torn apart by civil war could soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades, experts said.
Fleeing hunger and war, Sudanese families like Adam Omar Osman, his wife, Fatima Hassan, and their four children crossed from the Darfur region to a refugee camp in Chad this month.
July 26, 2024
As Sudan hurtles toward famine, its military is blocking the United Nations from bringing enormous amounts of food into the country through a vital border crossing, effectively cutting off aid to hundreds of thousands of starving people during the depths of a civil war.
Experts warn that Sudan, barely functioning after 15 months of fighting, could soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades. But the Sudanese military’s refusal to let U.N. aid convoys through the crossing is thwarting the kind of all-out relief effort that aid groups say is needed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths — as many as 2.5 million, according to one estimate — by the end of this year.
The risk is greatest in Darfur, the Spain-sized region that suffered a genocide two decades ago. Of the 14 Sudanese districts at immediate risk of famine, eight are in Darfur, right across the border that the United Nations is trying to cross. Time is running out to help them.
The closed border point, a subject of increasingly urgent appeals from American officials, is at Adré, the main crossing from Chad into Sudan. At the border, little more than a concrete bollard in a dried-out riverbed, just about everything seems to flow: refugees and traders, four-wheeled motorbikes carrying animal skins, and donkey carts laden with barrels of fuel.
What is forbidden from crossing into Sudan, however, are the U.N. trucks filled with food that are urgently needed in Darfur, where experts say that 440,000 people are already on the brink of starvation. Refugees fleeing Darfur now say that hunger, not conflict, is the main reason they left.
ImageA man in khaki stands with a coiled whip in his hand, in front of a crowd of children and adults looking up warily at him, some holding metal bowls.
A man with a whip tried to control a crowd of Sudanese refugees who were jostling to receive food during an impromptu aid distribution on the outskirts of Adré refugee camp.
Image
Rough tents spread over the horizon on a desert landscape under a cloud-filled sky.
Nearly 200,000 people squeeze into a single camp in Adré that sprawls into the surrounding desert. Shelter is scarce, and there is not enough food or water.
Image
A woman cooks over an open fire in front of tents made of tarps, next to several children.
Recently arrived refugees live in makeshift shelters in the camp.
A mother of three, Bahja Muhakar slumped with exhaustion under a tree after her family migrated into Chad at the Adré crossing. It had been a frightening six-day journey, from the besieged city of El Fasher, along roads where fighters threatened to kill them, she said. But the family felt they had little choice.
“We had nothing to eat,” Ms. Muhakar said, motioning to the children squatting beside her. She said they often subsisted on a single shared pancake per day.
The Sudanese military imposed the edict at the crossing five months ago, supposedly to prohibit weapons smuggling. It seems to make little sense. Arms, cash and fighters continue to flow into Sudan elsewhere on the 870-mile border that is mostly controlled by its enemy, a heavily armed paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F.
The military doesn’t even control the crossing at Adré, where R.S.F. fighters stand 100 yards behind the border on the Sudanese side.
A map of Sudan highlighting the Adre border crossing in Chad. It also features Tine, as well as El Geneina and El Fasher in the Darfur region.
LIBYA
EGYPT
200 MILES
SUDAN
Port Sudan
Red
Sea
CHAD
DARFUR
REGION
NIGER
Nile
Khartoum
Tine
El Fasher
Adré
El Geneina
NIGERIA
ETHIOPIA
SOUTH
SUDAN
CENTRAL AFRICAN
REPUBLIC
CAMEROON
Douala
By The New York Times
Even so, the U.N. says it must respect the order not to cross from the military, which is based in Port Sudan 1,000 miles to the east, because it is Sudan’s sovereign authority. Instead U.N. trucks are forced to make an arduous 200-mile detour north to Tine, at a crossing controlled by a militia allied with Sudan’s army, where they are allowed to enter Darfur.
The diversion is dangerous, expensive and takes up to five times as long as going through Adré. Only a fraction of the required aid is getting through Tine — 320 trucks of food since February, U.N. officials say, instead of the thousands that are needed. The Tine crossing was closed for most of this week after seasonal rains turned the border into a river.
Between February, when the Adré border crossing was shut, and June, the number of people facing emergency levels of hunger went from 1.7 million to seven million.
Image
One woman covering her head runs in rain, and another carries two water cans across muddy ground lined with huts made of sticks.
Heavy rain marked the start of the season in Adré camp.
Image
As the sun goes down, two men kneel on a mat, one with his arms raised in supplication.
At sunset, prayer at the Adré refugee camp in Chad.
Image
Drenched people huddle under a cart draped with a yellow plastic tarp.
Refugees who just fled territory in Darfur controlled by the Rapid Support Forces take shelter under a donkey cart and plastic sheeting at the camp in Chad.
As the prospect of mass starvation in Sudan draws closer, the Adré closure has become a central focus of efforts by the United States, by far the largest donor, to ramp up the emergency aid effort. “This obstruction is completely unacceptable,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., recently told reporters.
Getting aid into Darfur was difficult even before the war. Adré is roughly equidistant from the Atlantic to the west and the Red Sea to the east, about 1,100 miles as the crow flies in either direction. Roads are rutted, lined with bribe-seeking officials and prone to seasonal flooding. A truck leaving the port of Douala, on the west coast in Cameroon, takes nearly three months to reach the Sudanese border, one U.N. official said.
//A Massacre Threatens Darfur — Again https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... latedLinks
//Darfur, the region of Sudan once synonymous with genocide, may be on the brink of a new chapter of horror.
Blame for the looming famine is hardly limited to the military. The Rapid Support Forces also paved its path. Since the war started in April 2023, their fighters have scattered millions from their homes, burned factories that make baby food and looted aid convoys. They continue to rampage through Sudan’s breadbasket regions, which were among the most productive in Africa, causing massive food shortages.
And the international response to Sudan’s plight has largely been paltry, slow and lacking in urgency.
At a conference in Paris in April, donors pledged $2 billion in aid for Sudan, just half the requested amount, but those pledges have not been fully delivered. In the teeming refugee camps of eastern Chad, the lack of funds translates into desperate living conditions.
Image
Two-wheeled carts pulled by donkeys carry metal barrels of fuel, with drivers sitting atop.
Carts carrying gasoline are permitted to cross at Adré into Sudan. Porters say the fuel is used by the Rapid Support Forces.
In Adré, nearly 200,000 people squeeze into a single transit camp that sprawls into the surrounding desert. Latrines overflow. Shelter is scarce.
The U.N. refugee agency, which manages refugee camps in Chad, said its operations were 21 percent funded in June. The World Food Program was recently forced to cut rations because it lacked money.
As rain pelted down, Aisha Idriss, 22, huddled under a plastic sheet, gripping it tight against gusts of wind as she nursed her 4-month-old daughter. Her three other children squatted beside them.
“We sleep here,” she said, referring to the sodden ground.
Just three beds were empty in a malnutrition center run by Doctors Without Borders, filled with starving infants. The youngest was 33 days old, a girl whose mother had died in childbirth.
In the next bed lay Moaid Salah, a 20-month-old boy whose thinning hair and gaunt features were classic symptoms of malnutrition. He had arrived in Chad last November after gunmen stormed into his family’s home in El Geneina, across the border in Darfur, and killed his grandfather.
“They shot him in front of our eyes,” said Moaid’s mother, Dahabaya Ibet. Now their struggle was to survive on meager U.N. rations.
“Whatever we get, it isn’t enough,” she said, spooning formula into Maiad’s mouth.
Image
A baby lying on a hospital bed screams as his mother lays her hand on his chest and a doctor in a white jacket and gloves leans over the bed.
Manahil Khatar, 20, held her 5-month-old son, Ashuwak Ibrahim, at a malnutrition center run by Doctors Without Borders in Adré, where he was treated for an infected wound on his arm that stemmed from continuous intravenous treatment for malnourishment.
Image
Dahabaya Ibet and her gaunt 20-month-old son, Moaid Salah, at the malnutrition center.
Image
People lean over taps filling plastic jerrycans with water.
Camp residents filling water containers. They receive as little as six liters of water a day, one third of the recommended minimum.
The situation is much worse in Darfur, where just a handful of aid groups are still working with international staff. The U.N., which pulled out at the start of the war, works through local organizations. The World Food Program says it can reach just 10 percent of people in need.
In a survey released last week, Mercy Corps said that one quarter of children in central Darfur state were so malnourished that they could soon die.
Experts say that only the World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian organization with a budget of $8.5 billion last year, has the resources and expertise needed to ramp up an emergency operation at scale. But without unimpeded access to the border, providing aid is proving extremely challenging.
Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/07/25/121 ... _1080p.mp4
CreditCredit...
It takes trucks several extra days just to reach the border crossing at Tine. To cross into Sudan, trucks need permits issued by the authorities in Port Sudan that can take weeks to arrive, if they do at all, aid officials said.
In an interview, Sudan’s ambassador to the U.N., Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, defended the Adré closure, citing evidence collected by Sudanese intelligence of arms smuggling. He said the U.N. was “happy” with the arrangement of routing trucks north through the border at Tine.
He added that foreign countries predicting a famine in Sudan were relying on “old figures” and seeking a pretext “for international intervention.”
He said, “We have seen deliberate, meticulous politicization of humanitarian aid to Sudan from the donors.”
At the Adré crossing, the military’s inability to control anything entering Sudan is starkly apparent. Porters with donkey carts said they deliver hundreds of barrels of gasoline that are consumed by the R.S.F.’s four-wheel-drive vehicles, which are usually mounted with guns.
Image
Men playing on a field of uneven red earth run toward a white soccer ball.
Refugees playing soccer on the outskirts of Adré camp.
Image
A man having his hair trimmed sits in a chair in front of a mirror in a makeshift shelter made of sticks and tarps.
A barber trims hair in a makeshift shop in the Adré camp.
Image
Colorful clothing hung on a line between two sticks.
Men’s clothing for sale at the Adré camp.
And farther north, the R.S.F.’s powerful patron, the United Arab Emirates, continues to smuggle weapons and cash across the porous border, several western officials said.
The swelling crisis has brought recriminations inside the aid community. In private, aid workers and American officials say the U.N. leadership should be more forcefully urging the military to reopen the Adré crossing. Some wonder why the organization has not lined up trucks at the border, as it did in Gaza last year, to step up the pressure.
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Sudan did not respond to questions for this story.
//A War on the Nile Pushes Sudan Toward the Abyss https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/worl ... latedLinks
//A year of fighting has turned the once proud capital, Khartoum, into a charred battleground. Millions have fled. Now a famine threatens in one of //Africa’s biggest countries.
//June 5, 2024
In Washington, intelligence briefings provided to the State Department and White House have confirmed the stark projections, issued by aid groups, for mass famine-related deaths by the end of this year, said a senior American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
The coming famine is likely to be as deadly as the one in Somalia in 2011, the official said, and by the worst estimates could match the great Ethiopia famine of the 1980s.
To override the blockage at Adré, American officials including Ms. Thomas-Greenfield have called on the United Nations Security Council to permit U.N. trucks to cross at Adré without military authorization, as what happened earlier with cross-border aid into Syria. But analysts say that Russia, which recently offered arms to Sudan’s military, would be likely to veto such a resolution.
The other hope now is fresh cease-fire talks, announced this week and mediated by the United States, that are scheduled to start in Switzerland mid-August. In an interview, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, said he would be pressing both sides to allow full humanitarian access — if they even show up for the talks.
Image
A woman in purple walks past people sitting on the ground, some under tarps and sticks.
Recently arrived refugees gathered on the outskirts of Adré camp, while they waited to be registered and allocated space.
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
How a Crisis for Vultures Led to a Human Disaster: Half a Million Deaths
The birds were accidentally poisoned in India. New research on what happened next shows how wildlife collapse can be deadly for people.
A vulture in northern India, in 2020. A drug given to cattle in the 1990s nearly wiped out the birds in South Asia.Credit...Sanjay Baid/EPA, via Shutterstock
To say that vultures are underappreciated would be putting it mildly. With their diet of carrion and their featherless heads, the birds are often viewed with disgust. But they have long provided a critical cleaning service by devouring the dead.
Now, economists have put an excruciating figure on just how vital they can be: The sudden near-disappearance of vultures in India about two decades ago led to more than half a million excess human deaths over five years, according to a forthcoming study in the American Economic Review.
Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs, which can carry rabies. It was “a really huge negative sanitation shock,” said Anant Sudarshan, one of the study’s authors and an economics professor at the University of Warwick in England.
The findings reveal the unintended consequences that can occur from the collapse of wildlife, especially animals known as keystone species for the outsize roles they play in their ecosystems. Increasingly, economists are seeking to measure such impacts.
A study looking at the United States, for example, has suggested that the loss of ash trees to the invasive emerald ash borer increased deaths related to cardiovascular and respiratory illness. And in Wisconsin, researchers found that the presence of wolves reduced vehicle collisions with deer by about a quarter, creating an economic benefit that was 63 times greater than the cost of wolves killing livestock.
“Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning do matter to human beings,” said Eyal Frank, an economist at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of the new vulture study. “And it’s not always the charismatic and fuzzy species.”
Dr. Frank first learned the story of the vultures in India from Dr. Sudarshan.
The country was once home to tens of millions of vultures. Growing up in New Delhi, Dr. Sudarshan remembers seeing large flocks on his way to and from school, when his bus would cross a river with tanneries on each side.
“The river would be lined with these birds, huge birds, which would come down and eat those carcasses,” Dr. Sudarshan said. “When they disappeared, which was very rapid, that change was quite visible.”
Image
A group of stray dogs gathered on a trash-strewn riverbank, with a pedestrian bridge crossing over the river above them.
Feral dogs in Baramulla, in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, in 2022. Credit...Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto, via Getty
For years, the vulture deaths were a mystery. But in 2004, scientists discovered that an anti-inflammatory medicine used in cattle, diclofenac, was highly toxic to the birds. A decade earlier, its patent had expired, leading to cheaper generic versions that farmers started using widely.
Conservationists pushed to get the drug banned for veterinary use, succeeding in 2006. But by then, India’s vultures had declined by more than 95 percent. In ecosystem terms, they had gone functionally extinct.
To assess the consequences on humans, Dr. Frank and Dr. Sudarshan first used range maps to determine where the vultures had lived and where they had not. Comparing human death rates between those districts would be key, because places that had never been home to a significant number of vultures would act as a kind of control to the terrible natural experiment wrought by diclofenac.
When the economists looked at the raw data plotted on graphs, they almost couldn’t believe how precisely it lined up with what they had predicted based on anecdotal reports. In districts where vultures had lived, human death rates started ticking up in 1994, the year after the price dropped on diclofenac, and they continued rising over the next several years. The districts that had not been home to vultures, on the other hand, remained remarkably steady.
To test what they were seeing, the economists examined other evidence, such as changes in water quality and sales of rabies vaccines.
Kelsey Jack, a professor of environmental economics at the University of California Berkeley who was not affiliated with the research, praised its importance and creativity.
“While this is a case study of a single species in a single country, it highlights the potentially large value of ecosystem services from keystone species,” Dr. Jack said. “This helps inform policy decisions, where policymakers have to trade off the costs of conservation with the benefits.”
Image
A vulture pecks at the skin of a dead buffalo.
A vulture feeding on a buffalo carcass at Kaziranga National Park in India in March.Credit...Anuwar Hazarika/NurPhoto, via Associated Press
Vultures in India are now at less than 1 percent of their previous populations, and appear to have stabilized at that new low, said Chris Bowden, who helps coordinate SAVE, a consortium of groups working to save South Asia’s vultures from extinction.
Four species are critically endangered. Despite the ban on diclofenac in livestock, it continues to be used illegally, and other anti-inflammatory drugs have been approved that are toxic to vultures, Mr. Bowden said.
In Pakistan and Nepal, the birds were also devastated by diclofenac. But in Nepal, where the ban on veterinary diclofenac use has been more effective, vulture populations have increased significantly over the past seven years, Mr. Bowden said.
Scientists warn that governments in Europe and South Asia are still not regulating veterinary drugs sufficiently to protect vultures.
In Africa, vultures are often unintended victims of poisoned carcasses meant to kill predators like lions and hyenas. Populations there have also plummeted. In North America, vultures are generally stable or increasing, though California condors remain critically endangered.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/clim ... oning.html
The birds were accidentally poisoned in India. New research on what happened next shows how wildlife collapse can be deadly for people.
A vulture in northern India, in 2020. A drug given to cattle in the 1990s nearly wiped out the birds in South Asia.Credit...Sanjay Baid/EPA, via Shutterstock
To say that vultures are underappreciated would be putting it mildly. With their diet of carrion and their featherless heads, the birds are often viewed with disgust. But they have long provided a critical cleaning service by devouring the dead.
Now, economists have put an excruciating figure on just how vital they can be: The sudden near-disappearance of vultures in India about two decades ago led to more than half a million excess human deaths over five years, according to a forthcoming study in the American Economic Review.
Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs, which can carry rabies. It was “a really huge negative sanitation shock,” said Anant Sudarshan, one of the study’s authors and an economics professor at the University of Warwick in England.
The findings reveal the unintended consequences that can occur from the collapse of wildlife, especially animals known as keystone species for the outsize roles they play in their ecosystems. Increasingly, economists are seeking to measure such impacts.
A study looking at the United States, for example, has suggested that the loss of ash trees to the invasive emerald ash borer increased deaths related to cardiovascular and respiratory illness. And in Wisconsin, researchers found that the presence of wolves reduced vehicle collisions with deer by about a quarter, creating an economic benefit that was 63 times greater than the cost of wolves killing livestock.
“Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning do matter to human beings,” said Eyal Frank, an economist at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of the new vulture study. “And it’s not always the charismatic and fuzzy species.”
Dr. Frank first learned the story of the vultures in India from Dr. Sudarshan.
The country was once home to tens of millions of vultures. Growing up in New Delhi, Dr. Sudarshan remembers seeing large flocks on his way to and from school, when his bus would cross a river with tanneries on each side.
“The river would be lined with these birds, huge birds, which would come down and eat those carcasses,” Dr. Sudarshan said. “When they disappeared, which was very rapid, that change was quite visible.”
Image
A group of stray dogs gathered on a trash-strewn riverbank, with a pedestrian bridge crossing over the river above them.
Feral dogs in Baramulla, in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, in 2022. Credit...Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto, via Getty
For years, the vulture deaths were a mystery. But in 2004, scientists discovered that an anti-inflammatory medicine used in cattle, diclofenac, was highly toxic to the birds. A decade earlier, its patent had expired, leading to cheaper generic versions that farmers started using widely.
Conservationists pushed to get the drug banned for veterinary use, succeeding in 2006. But by then, India’s vultures had declined by more than 95 percent. In ecosystem terms, they had gone functionally extinct.
To assess the consequences on humans, Dr. Frank and Dr. Sudarshan first used range maps to determine where the vultures had lived and where they had not. Comparing human death rates between those districts would be key, because places that had never been home to a significant number of vultures would act as a kind of control to the terrible natural experiment wrought by diclofenac.
When the economists looked at the raw data plotted on graphs, they almost couldn’t believe how precisely it lined up with what they had predicted based on anecdotal reports. In districts where vultures had lived, human death rates started ticking up in 1994, the year after the price dropped on diclofenac, and they continued rising over the next several years. The districts that had not been home to vultures, on the other hand, remained remarkably steady.
To test what they were seeing, the economists examined other evidence, such as changes in water quality and sales of rabies vaccines.
Kelsey Jack, a professor of environmental economics at the University of California Berkeley who was not affiliated with the research, praised its importance and creativity.
“While this is a case study of a single species in a single country, it highlights the potentially large value of ecosystem services from keystone species,” Dr. Jack said. “This helps inform policy decisions, where policymakers have to trade off the costs of conservation with the benefits.”
Image
A vulture pecks at the skin of a dead buffalo.
A vulture feeding on a buffalo carcass at Kaziranga National Park in India in March.Credit...Anuwar Hazarika/NurPhoto, via Associated Press
Vultures in India are now at less than 1 percent of their previous populations, and appear to have stabilized at that new low, said Chris Bowden, who helps coordinate SAVE, a consortium of groups working to save South Asia’s vultures from extinction.
Four species are critically endangered. Despite the ban on diclofenac in livestock, it continues to be used illegally, and other anti-inflammatory drugs have been approved that are toxic to vultures, Mr. Bowden said.
In Pakistan and Nepal, the birds were also devastated by diclofenac. But in Nepal, where the ban on veterinary diclofenac use has been more effective, vulture populations have increased significantly over the past seven years, Mr. Bowden said.
Scientists warn that governments in Europe and South Asia are still not regulating veterinary drugs sufficiently to protect vultures.
In Africa, vultures are often unintended victims of poisoned carcasses meant to kill predators like lions and hyenas. Populations there have also plummeted. In North America, vultures are generally stable or increasing, though California condors remain critically endangered.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/clim ... oning.html
A country in ruins
In Omdurman, Sudan. Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
After more than a year of civil war, the toll in Sudan is heartbreaking: thousands killed, millions scattered and cities besieged or destroyed across a vast nation three times as large as France. Much of the capital lies in rubble. This month, international officials declared that part of Sudan was in a famine. At least 100 people die of hunger every day.
And there are signs it could soon get much worse.
Recently, I spent three weeks in Sudan, traveling across a part of the world that few foreign reporters have reached. The scale and intensity of destruction were startling: A conflict that started as a power struggle between rival generals has metastasized into a far bigger and messier conflagration, threatening to spread chaos across an already fragile region.
Map shows Sudan and highlights the region of Darfur and Jazeera.
By The New York Times
Despite all that, the conflict has received scant attention from world leaders or money for humanitarian aid. But its soaring human cost is making it ever harder to ignore. U.N. experts warn that Sudan is again spiraling into genocidal violence, as it did in the early 2000s. Samantha Power, the head of USAID, says it is “the single largest humanitarian crisis on the planet.”
One faint glimmer of hope lies in tentative peace talks, mediated by the United States, that started in Switzerland yesterday. Today’s newsletter explains the stakes: how an unexpected civil war is crushing Africa’s third-largest country — and what could stop the suffering.
Hope on the ropes
Only five years ago, Sudan was the source of euphoric hopes, when crowds of young people gathered to oust President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the country’s dictator of three decades. For once, it seemed that a popular revolution in an Arab country might succeed.
Artists flourished. Politics opened up. Western governments offered to cancel billions of dollars in debt. Al-Bashir went to jail, convicted on corruption charges.
Those dreams were dashed after just two years, in 2021, when Sudan’s military and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, unwilling to cede power to civilians, united to overthrow the government in a coup.
But the alliance was short-lived. The coup leaders — the army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the R.S.F. commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan — fell out over how to merge their forces. Then they went to war.
A surprise war
When the first shots rang out on the streets of the capital, Khartoum, in April 2023, many residents figured it wouldn’t last long. Sudan had experienced dozens of coups, more than any country in Africa, since it won independence in 1956. Most were short-lived and bloodless.
But the military found that the R.S.F., a force it had once helped to create, was now a formidable adversary with fighters more battle-hardened than its own forces. By December, the R.S.F. had seized most of Khartoum and the country’s breadbasket region, Jazeera State, as well as much of Darfur, the western region that suffered a genocide two decades earlier.
General Hamdan, the R.S.F. leader, claims to be fighting for Sudan’s marginalized and has sought to distance his force from its roots in the Janjaweed militias that terrorized Darfur in the 2000s. But his lofty speeches are at odds with the massacres, rape and ethnic violence that human rights groups say his fighters commit.
The Sudanese military is also guilty of war crimes, U.S. officials say, including indiscriminate bombing and the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
People, mostly women in colorful head scarves, lined up holding bowls.
Sudanese refugees in Chad. Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Rising stakes
Because Sudan is such a huge and populous country, the number of people who may starve is staggering.
According to the latest estimates, 26 million people — over half the population — are suffering crisis levels of hunger. On Aug. 1, two groups of global hunger experts declared famine at a camp in Darfur, the world’s first since 2020. Other parts of the country may soon follow, they say.
The conflict also brings political risk. It could spread to Sudan’s weak neighbors, like Chad or South Sudan. European leaders fear an influx of refugees. American intelligence worries that a lawless Sudan could become a terrorist haven.
Other foreign powers are already involved in the conflict, choosing sides and providing weapons that ravage civilian neighborhoods. The United Arab Emirates has armed the R.S.F. Iran supplied drones to the military. Russia, over the course of the war, has backed both sides.
The American-led peace talks that started in Geneva yesterday seem like a long shot — Sudan’s military didn’t even send a team of negotiators. But officials alarmed by the spiraling hunger crisis say there is little choice but to try. Millions of lives could be on the line.
For more
The war has transformed Khartoum, once a city of high rises and five-star hotels, into a battleground. https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlo ... reserved=0
Videos and satellite images show just how much destruction the war has brought. https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlo ... reserved=0
For The Times Magazine, Nicholas Casey embedded with a Sudanese militia that says it’s fighting to establish a Western-style democracy. https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlo ... reserved=0
NYTimes Newsletter
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
The War in Gaza Is Making Thousands of Orphans
Extended families, hospital staff and volunteers are stepping in to care for Gaza’s many newly orphaned children, some of whom are injured, traumatized and haunted by memories of their parents.
Palestinian children attending a recreational summer camp for orphaned children last month in the northern Gaza Strip.Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The boys are aching to see their parents again. They are convinced it will happen as soon as they can go back to Gaza City, where they were growing up before the war bulldozed that life.
“Baba and mama will be waiting for us there,” they say to their aunt Samar, who is taking care of the four of them, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Ahmed and Abdullah Akeila. They say this even though they were told their parents are dead, have been dead for months, ever since the airstrike that hit next to where the family was sheltering.
Except for Ahmed, the second youngest at 13, none of them saw the bodies. The brothers spend every passing milestone in tears, almost unable to speak — Mother’s Day was hard; so was the Eid holiday — yet still they hold out hope. Every evening when the sundown prayer is said, 9-year-old Abdullah says he can hear his mother’s voice.
Their aunt, Samar al-Jaja, 31, who shares a tent with the children in the Gazan city of Khan Younis, is at a loss. “When they see other parents holding their kids close and talking to them,” she said, “how do they feel?”
Image
Two boys in collared white shirts sit next to each other.
Abdullah Akeila, left, and his brother Ahmed, right, in Gaza.Credit...Bilal Shbair for The New York Times
The war in Gaza is taking children from parents and parents from children, undoing the natural order of things, rupturing the basic unit of Gazan life. It is making so many orphans in such chaos that no agency or aid group can count them.
Medical staff say children are left to roam hospital hallways and fend for themselves after being rushed there bloodied and alone — “wounded child, no surviving family,” some hospitals label them. Neonatal units house babies whom no one has come to claim.
In Khan Younis, a volunteer-run camp has sprung up to shelter more than 1,000 children who have lost one or both parents, including the Akeilas. One section is dedicated to “only survivors,” children who have lost their entire families, except perhaps a sibling. There is a long waiting list.
Amid the bombing, the constant pell-mell evacuations from tent to tent and apartment to hospital to shelter, no one can say how many children have lost track of their parents, and how many have lost them for good.
Using a statistical method drawn from analyzing other wars, United Nations experts estimate that at least 19,000 children are now surviving apart from their parents, whether with relatives, with other caretakers or on their own.
Image
A child in a hospital bed under a gray blanket with a female relative in a head scarf looking to the left.
Melisya Joudeh, whose parents were killed in an Oct. 22 strike, at a Gaza hospital with her aunt, Yasmine, keeping vigil in October.Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
But the true figure is probably higher. Those other wars did not involve this much bombing and this much displacement in such a small and crowded place, with a population that includes such a high proportion of children, said Jonathan Crickx, a spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency.
The Israeli military says it takes precautions to limit harm to civilians in its devastating campaign in Gaza to eradicate Hamas over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which left about 1,200 people dead and roughly 250 taken hostage. More than 100 captives still remain in Gaza, at least 30 of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel accuses Hamas of endangering Gazans by operating in their midst. Hamas defends its use of civilian clothes and civilian homes, saying its members have no alternative.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed: many of them children, many parents. In April, 41 percent of families Mr. Crickx’s agency surveyed in Gaza were caring for children not their own.
A few children have been born orphans, after their wounded mothers died during labor, said Dr. Deborah Harrington, a British obstetrician who saw two babies born that way while volunteering in Gaza in December.
Far more often, children and parents are sundered when Israeli forces arrest parents, or after an airstrike, the children rushed to hospitals alone in the confusion.
Doctors say they have treated many newly orphaned children, many of them amputees.
“There was no one there to hold their hand, no one there to give them comfort” during the agonizing operations, said Dr. Irfan Galaria, a plastic surgeon from Virginia who volunteered at a Gaza hospital in February.
Aid workers try to track down parents, if they are alive, or relatives. But government systems that could have helped have collapsed. Communications are spotty. Evacuation orders split up family trees, sending the splinters in all directions.
Image
People walk through rubble next to a bombed-out building.
The rubble of the Hasouna family house after a strike in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, in February. Ibrahim Hasouna, who was away at the time, says his entire family was killed, including his parents.Credit...Fatima Shbair/Associated Press
Some young children are so traumatized that they go mute and cannot give their names, making the search near-impossible, according to SOS Children’s Villages, an aid group that runs a Gaza orphanage.
Then there is Mennat-Allah Salah, 11, who talks constantly about her parents. Orphaned in December, she copies the way her mother laughed, winked, walked. She wears her mother’s sneakers and favorite T-shirt, too big though they are.
“My mom,” she said, “was everything to me,” and tears came, and she could not go on.
Among the premature babies who arrived at the Emirati Hospital in the southern city of Rafah in November was a 3-week-old girl whose family was unknown. Her file said she had been found next to a Gaza City mosque after an airstrike that killed dozens of people, according to Amal Abu Khatleh, a neonatal nurse at the hospital. The staff called her “Majhoul,” Arabic for “unidentified.”
Upset by the starkness of that name, Ms. Abu Khatleh decided to give her a proper one: Malak, or “angel.” She called journalists in northern Gaza to find out which families had lost members in a strike near where Malak was found, then questioned patients with those surnames about a missing baby girl. No luck.
Image
Close-up of a baby.
Malak, or “angel” who was among the premature babies who arrived at the Emirati Hospital in the southern city of Rafah in November.
Credit...via Amal Abu Khatleh
In January, worried about Malak’s development, Ms. Abu Khatleh took her home.
As in other Muslim societies, religious strictures make legal adoption impossible in Gaza, though people can take in and financially sponsor orphans. Yet Ms. Abu Khatleh’s family, friends and colleagues rallied around her, donating clothes, formula and diapers.
Unless she finds Malak’s parents, she said, she plans to keep her, despite the legal hurdles.
“I feel Malak is my real daughter,” she said. “I love her. My friends even say she looks like me now.”
In most instances, aid officials say, Gaza’s close-knit extended families step in as caretakers. So it went with the Akeila brothers.
Their aunt, Ms. al-Jaja, told the story: There were seven of them, the father, a tailor, the mother, who stayed at home, their four sons and their baby daughter, Fatima.
On Oct. 23, they were sheltering at a relative’s house when an airstrike shattered a neighboring building, according to the family. Zahra Akeila, 40, was killed alongside Fatima, their bodies dug out by relatives six hours later.
Ms. al-Jaja wept for her sister, she recalled. But Ahmed, the only child there to see his mother’s body in her coffin, stayed dry-eyed and silent with shock.
His eldest brother, Mohammed, 21, has been developmentally disabled since birth. The family lied to him at first, saying his mother was in surgery. Mahmoud, 19, who was badly injured in his right leg, was sent to another hospital before they could tell him.
Image
A boy in a wheelchair is surrounded by his three brothers.
Brothers Abdullah Akeila, right, Ahmed, back center, Mohammed, who is disabled, in the wheelchair and Mahmoud, left, in Gaza.
Credit...via Akeila family
Abdullah, the youngest at 9, was still being treated when they buried her. Hours before the strike, he remembered her making them dinner, handing them juice and chips, promising a few shekels’ allowance; he remembered hearing a boom, remembered her ushering them away from the windows.
The next thing he knew, he said, he was waking up in the hospital. When he would not stop asking about his mother, relatives finally told him, “Mama is in heaven now,” Ms. al-Jaja said.
Another few days, and the children’s father, Mohammed Kamel Akeila, 44, who had been hanging on in intensive care, was dead.
Israel’s military said that the building next to the Akeilas’ shelter that it struck had been Hamas “infrastructure,” without giving details.
Ms. al-Jaja soon left her fiancé in another city to live with the boys. Even after she marries, she said, she and the boys’ uncle will help their grandparents raise them.
“These children’s future is nothing without their parents,” she said. But they would try: “Their mother was such a kind person. Now we have to pay back all the good things she did for us.”
The camp provides some meals and cash. As everyone struggles for survival, however, U.N. social workers have seen a few Gazan families prioritize their own children over orphaned relatives, Mr. Crickx said. And orphans are highly vulnerable to exploitation, violence and abuse.
If they make it to peacetime, shelter, clean water and mental and physical health care will be doubtful, to say nothing of their education, job and marriage prospects.
Even for children who still have parents, postwar Gaza will be a difficult place to grow up, said Mahmoud Kalakh, a charity worker who founded the orphans’ camp.
“So what about these children who have no source of income or provider, having lost their fathers or mothers?” he said.
Abu Bakr Bashir and Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
Gaza’s Children
‘There Is No Childhood in Gaza’ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/worl ... latedLinks
Aug. 17, 2024
The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/worl ... latedLinks
Nov. 18, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Extended families, hospital staff and volunteers are stepping in to care for Gaza’s many newly orphaned children, some of whom are injured, traumatized and haunted by memories of their parents.
Palestinian children attending a recreational summer camp for orphaned children last month in the northern Gaza Strip.Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The boys are aching to see their parents again. They are convinced it will happen as soon as they can go back to Gaza City, where they were growing up before the war bulldozed that life.
“Baba and mama will be waiting for us there,” they say to their aunt Samar, who is taking care of the four of them, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Ahmed and Abdullah Akeila. They say this even though they were told their parents are dead, have been dead for months, ever since the airstrike that hit next to where the family was sheltering.
Except for Ahmed, the second youngest at 13, none of them saw the bodies. The brothers spend every passing milestone in tears, almost unable to speak — Mother’s Day was hard; so was the Eid holiday — yet still they hold out hope. Every evening when the sundown prayer is said, 9-year-old Abdullah says he can hear his mother’s voice.
Their aunt, Samar al-Jaja, 31, who shares a tent with the children in the Gazan city of Khan Younis, is at a loss. “When they see other parents holding their kids close and talking to them,” she said, “how do they feel?”
Image
Two boys in collared white shirts sit next to each other.
Abdullah Akeila, left, and his brother Ahmed, right, in Gaza.Credit...Bilal Shbair for The New York Times
The war in Gaza is taking children from parents and parents from children, undoing the natural order of things, rupturing the basic unit of Gazan life. It is making so many orphans in such chaos that no agency or aid group can count them.
Medical staff say children are left to roam hospital hallways and fend for themselves after being rushed there bloodied and alone — “wounded child, no surviving family,” some hospitals label them. Neonatal units house babies whom no one has come to claim.
In Khan Younis, a volunteer-run camp has sprung up to shelter more than 1,000 children who have lost one or both parents, including the Akeilas. One section is dedicated to “only survivors,” children who have lost their entire families, except perhaps a sibling. There is a long waiting list.
Amid the bombing, the constant pell-mell evacuations from tent to tent and apartment to hospital to shelter, no one can say how many children have lost track of their parents, and how many have lost them for good.
Using a statistical method drawn from analyzing other wars, United Nations experts estimate that at least 19,000 children are now surviving apart from their parents, whether with relatives, with other caretakers or on their own.
Image
A child in a hospital bed under a gray blanket with a female relative in a head scarf looking to the left.
Melisya Joudeh, whose parents were killed in an Oct. 22 strike, at a Gaza hospital with her aunt, Yasmine, keeping vigil in October.Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
But the true figure is probably higher. Those other wars did not involve this much bombing and this much displacement in such a small and crowded place, with a population that includes such a high proportion of children, said Jonathan Crickx, a spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency.
The Israeli military says it takes precautions to limit harm to civilians in its devastating campaign in Gaza to eradicate Hamas over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which left about 1,200 people dead and roughly 250 taken hostage. More than 100 captives still remain in Gaza, at least 30 of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel accuses Hamas of endangering Gazans by operating in their midst. Hamas defends its use of civilian clothes and civilian homes, saying its members have no alternative.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed: many of them children, many parents. In April, 41 percent of families Mr. Crickx’s agency surveyed in Gaza were caring for children not their own.
A few children have been born orphans, after their wounded mothers died during labor, said Dr. Deborah Harrington, a British obstetrician who saw two babies born that way while volunteering in Gaza in December.
Far more often, children and parents are sundered when Israeli forces arrest parents, or after an airstrike, the children rushed to hospitals alone in the confusion.
Doctors say they have treated many newly orphaned children, many of them amputees.
“There was no one there to hold their hand, no one there to give them comfort” during the agonizing operations, said Dr. Irfan Galaria, a plastic surgeon from Virginia who volunteered at a Gaza hospital in February.
Aid workers try to track down parents, if they are alive, or relatives. But government systems that could have helped have collapsed. Communications are spotty. Evacuation orders split up family trees, sending the splinters in all directions.
Image
People walk through rubble next to a bombed-out building.
The rubble of the Hasouna family house after a strike in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, in February. Ibrahim Hasouna, who was away at the time, says his entire family was killed, including his parents.Credit...Fatima Shbair/Associated Press
Some young children are so traumatized that they go mute and cannot give their names, making the search near-impossible, according to SOS Children’s Villages, an aid group that runs a Gaza orphanage.
Then there is Mennat-Allah Salah, 11, who talks constantly about her parents. Orphaned in December, she copies the way her mother laughed, winked, walked. She wears her mother’s sneakers and favorite T-shirt, too big though they are.
“My mom,” she said, “was everything to me,” and tears came, and she could not go on.
Among the premature babies who arrived at the Emirati Hospital in the southern city of Rafah in November was a 3-week-old girl whose family was unknown. Her file said she had been found next to a Gaza City mosque after an airstrike that killed dozens of people, according to Amal Abu Khatleh, a neonatal nurse at the hospital. The staff called her “Majhoul,” Arabic for “unidentified.”
Upset by the starkness of that name, Ms. Abu Khatleh decided to give her a proper one: Malak, or “angel.” She called journalists in northern Gaza to find out which families had lost members in a strike near where Malak was found, then questioned patients with those surnames about a missing baby girl. No luck.
Image
Close-up of a baby.
Malak, or “angel” who was among the premature babies who arrived at the Emirati Hospital in the southern city of Rafah in November.
Credit...via Amal Abu Khatleh
In January, worried about Malak’s development, Ms. Abu Khatleh took her home.
As in other Muslim societies, religious strictures make legal adoption impossible in Gaza, though people can take in and financially sponsor orphans. Yet Ms. Abu Khatleh’s family, friends and colleagues rallied around her, donating clothes, formula and diapers.
Unless she finds Malak’s parents, she said, she plans to keep her, despite the legal hurdles.
“I feel Malak is my real daughter,” she said. “I love her. My friends even say she looks like me now.”
In most instances, aid officials say, Gaza’s close-knit extended families step in as caretakers. So it went with the Akeila brothers.
Their aunt, Ms. al-Jaja, told the story: There were seven of them, the father, a tailor, the mother, who stayed at home, their four sons and their baby daughter, Fatima.
On Oct. 23, they were sheltering at a relative’s house when an airstrike shattered a neighboring building, according to the family. Zahra Akeila, 40, was killed alongside Fatima, their bodies dug out by relatives six hours later.
Ms. al-Jaja wept for her sister, she recalled. But Ahmed, the only child there to see his mother’s body in her coffin, stayed dry-eyed and silent with shock.
His eldest brother, Mohammed, 21, has been developmentally disabled since birth. The family lied to him at first, saying his mother was in surgery. Mahmoud, 19, who was badly injured in his right leg, was sent to another hospital before they could tell him.
Image
A boy in a wheelchair is surrounded by his three brothers.
Brothers Abdullah Akeila, right, Ahmed, back center, Mohammed, who is disabled, in the wheelchair and Mahmoud, left, in Gaza.
Credit...via Akeila family
Abdullah, the youngest at 9, was still being treated when they buried her. Hours before the strike, he remembered her making them dinner, handing them juice and chips, promising a few shekels’ allowance; he remembered hearing a boom, remembered her ushering them away from the windows.
The next thing he knew, he said, he was waking up in the hospital. When he would not stop asking about his mother, relatives finally told him, “Mama is in heaven now,” Ms. al-Jaja said.
Another few days, and the children’s father, Mohammed Kamel Akeila, 44, who had been hanging on in intensive care, was dead.
Israel’s military said that the building next to the Akeilas’ shelter that it struck had been Hamas “infrastructure,” without giving details.
Ms. al-Jaja soon left her fiancé in another city to live with the boys. Even after she marries, she said, she and the boys’ uncle will help their grandparents raise them.
“These children’s future is nothing without their parents,” she said. But they would try: “Their mother was such a kind person. Now we have to pay back all the good things she did for us.”
The camp provides some meals and cash. As everyone struggles for survival, however, U.N. social workers have seen a few Gazan families prioritize their own children over orphaned relatives, Mr. Crickx said. And orphans are highly vulnerable to exploitation, violence and abuse.
If they make it to peacetime, shelter, clean water and mental and physical health care will be doubtful, to say nothing of their education, job and marriage prospects.
Even for children who still have parents, postwar Gaza will be a difficult place to grow up, said Mahmoud Kalakh, a charity worker who founded the orphans’ camp.
“So what about these children who have no source of income or provider, having lost their fathers or mothers?” he said.
Abu Bakr Bashir and Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
Gaza’s Children
‘There Is No Childhood in Gaza’ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/worl ... latedLinks
Aug. 17, 2024
The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/worl ... latedLinks
Nov. 18, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
I Just Went to Darfur. Here Is What Shattered Me.
When an Arab militia rampaged through Maryam Suleiman’s village in the Darfur region of Sudan last year and lined up men and boys to massacre, the gunmen were blunt about their purpose.
“We don’t want to see any Black people,” a militia leader said, adding mockingly: “We don’t even want to see black trash bags.” To make his point, Maryam recalled, he shot a donkey because it was black.
Then the militia members executed men and boys who belonged to Black African ethnic groups, she said. “They shot my five brothers, one after the other,” Maryam told me, describing how her youngest brother survived the first bullet and called out to her. Then a militia member shot him in the head and sneeringly asked her what she thought of that.
The militia tried to systematically kill all the males over 10, Maryam said, and also killed some younger ones. A 1-day-old boy was thrown to the ground and killed, and one male infant was thrown into a pond to drown, she said.
The gunmen then rounded up the women and girls in a corral to rape, she added. “They raped many, many girls,” she recalled. One man tried to rape Maryam, she said, and when he failed he beat her. She was pregnant and suffered a miscarriage.
“You’re slaves,” Maryam quoted the militia members as saying. “There is no place for you Black people in Sudan.” So Maryam fled to neighboring Chad and is one of more than 10 million Sudanese who have been forcibly displaced since a civil war began last year in the country and ignited pogroms against Black African ethnic groups like hers.
Image
A photograph of a woman with her head and face covered by gray, white and blue cloth.
Maryam Suleiman wept as she recounted how a militia in Sudan attacked her village and killed her five brothers.Credit...Nicholas Kristof
The atrocities underway near here are an echo of the Darfur genocide of two decades ago, with the additional complication of famine. But there’s a crucial difference: At that time, world leaders, celebrities and university students vigorously protested the slaughter and joined forces to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, in contrast, the world is distracted and silent. So the impunity is allowing violence to go unchecked, which, in turn, is producing what may become the worst famine in half a century or more.
“It’s beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” Cindy McCain, the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, told me. “It’s catastrophic.”
“Unless,” she added, “we can get our job done.”
World leaders will convene next week in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, but they have been mostly indifferent and are unlikely to get the job done. What’s needed is far greater pressure to end the civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the rival Arab militia, while pushing the warring parties to allow humanitarian access. All sides in the war are behaving irresponsibly, so more than half the people of Sudan — 25 million people — have become acutely malnourished already. A famine was formally declared in one area in Sudan in the summer.
Video ID 100000009704915
This is what I witnessed — and it shattered me.
Timmo Gaasbeek, a disaster expert who has modeled the crisis for a research institute in the Netherlands, told me that he foresees 13 million people starving to death in Sudan by October 2025, with a margin of error of two million. Such a toll would make this one of the worst famines in world history and the worst since the great Chinese famine of 65 years ago. By way of contrast, the famous Ukraine famine of the 1930s killed perhaps four million people, although estimates vary.
I can’t verify that a cataclysm of that level is approaching. Warring parties blocked me from entering Sudanese areas they controlled, so I reported along the Chad-Sudan border. Arriving refugees described starvation but not yet mass mortality from malnutrition.
All I can say is that whether or not a cataclysmic famine is probable, it is a significant risk. Those in danger are people like Thuraya Muhammad, a slight 17-year-old orphan who told me how her world unraveled when the Rapid Support Forces, the same group that killed Maryam’s five brothers, attacked her village and began burning homes and shooting men and boys.
“So many men were killed, like grains of sand,” she told me.
Image
A photograph of three children standing in front of wooden structures. A young boy drinks water from a metal boy held by a girl with her head covered.
When Thuraya Muhammad, an orphan because of Sudan’s war, doesn’t have enough food to feed her younger sister and brother, she gives them water to fill their stomachs.Credit...Nicholas Kristof
After slaughtering the men in Thuraya’s village, the militia raped many women and girls, she said. Thuraya’s cousin, a woman of 20, was among those kidnapped by the militia and hasn’t been seen since, she added.
Thuraya’s father was murdered by the militia and her mother had died earlier, so at 16 she was now the head of the household. She led her younger brother and two younger sisters to safety by walking to the Chadian border town of Adré. Gunmen tried to rob them several times, but the family had nothing left to steal.
Now in a refugee camp in Chad, Thuraya works to feed her siblings. Like other refugees, she gets a monthly food allotment from the World Food Program that helps but is insufficient. She supports her family by seeking day jobs washing clothes or cleaning houses (for about 25 cents a day). When she finds work, she and her siblings eat; if not, they may go hungry.
When I dropped by their hut, Thuraya had been unable to find work that day. A friendly neighbor had given her a cup of coffee, but she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day — and there was no prospect of dinner, either. If there is no food, Thuraya told me, she serves water to her siblings in place of dinner.
She wept.
Thuraya wasn’t crying from her own pangs of hunger. Rather, tears tumbled silently down her cheeks out of shame at her inability to feed her brother and sisters.
“When there isn’t enough food, I give it to my sisters and brother,” she told me, and her younger sister Fatima confirmed that. “I go hungry, or else my neighbors may call me over to eat with them.”
“I’d rather my sisters and brother eat, because they cry when they go hungry,” she said. “And I can’t bear to hear them cry.”
Fatima resists the favoritism and tries to give her sister back some food. But Thuraya won’t take it and goes out, telling her brother and sisters to eat while she finds something for herself. They all know that in a refugee camp of about 200,000 hungry people, she will find nothing.
I’m hoping that Thuraya’s fortitude might inspire President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with world leaders gathering at the United Nations, to summon a similar resolve to tackle slaughter and starvation in Sudan. Donor nations have contributed less than half the sum needed by U.N. agencies to ease Sudan’s food crisis, and they have not insisted forcefully on either providing humanitarian access or on cutting off the flow of weapons that sustains the war.
Biden, who 20 years ago savaged President George W. Bush for not doing enough to stop the Darfur genocide, has provided aid and appointed a special envoy to push for peace talks but has said little about the current crisis. An American partner, the United Arab Emirates, supplies weapons to the militia that slaughtered and raped Thuraya’s neighbors, yet Biden has not publicly demanded that the Emirates cut off that support for killers and rapists.
The upshot of this neglect is the risk not only of a horrendous famine but also of endless war, Sudan’s fragmentation, enormous refugee flows and instability across the region.
So as world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly tuck into fine banquets next week to celebrate their humanitarianism, may they be awakened by thoughts of an orphan of Darfur who ignores her own hunger and divides scraps of bread among her brother and sisters.
Thuraya has no reason to feel ashamed that her siblings are hungry; the shame belongs to those who are powerful, well fed and blind.
What question do you have about the civil war in Sudan and the people affected by it? What more would you like to know? Submit your question or critique in the field below and Nicholas Kristof will try to respond to a selection of queries in a future installment in this series.
We are no longer accepting submissions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
When an Arab militia rampaged through Maryam Suleiman’s village in the Darfur region of Sudan last year and lined up men and boys to massacre, the gunmen were blunt about their purpose.
“We don’t want to see any Black people,” a militia leader said, adding mockingly: “We don’t even want to see black trash bags.” To make his point, Maryam recalled, he shot a donkey because it was black.
Then the militia members executed men and boys who belonged to Black African ethnic groups, she said. “They shot my five brothers, one after the other,” Maryam told me, describing how her youngest brother survived the first bullet and called out to her. Then a militia member shot him in the head and sneeringly asked her what she thought of that.
The militia tried to systematically kill all the males over 10, Maryam said, and also killed some younger ones. A 1-day-old boy was thrown to the ground and killed, and one male infant was thrown into a pond to drown, she said.
The gunmen then rounded up the women and girls in a corral to rape, she added. “They raped many, many girls,” she recalled. One man tried to rape Maryam, she said, and when he failed he beat her. She was pregnant and suffered a miscarriage.
“You’re slaves,” Maryam quoted the militia members as saying. “There is no place for you Black people in Sudan.” So Maryam fled to neighboring Chad and is one of more than 10 million Sudanese who have been forcibly displaced since a civil war began last year in the country and ignited pogroms against Black African ethnic groups like hers.
Image
A photograph of a woman with her head and face covered by gray, white and blue cloth.
Maryam Suleiman wept as she recounted how a militia in Sudan attacked her village and killed her five brothers.Credit...Nicholas Kristof
The atrocities underway near here are an echo of the Darfur genocide of two decades ago, with the additional complication of famine. But there’s a crucial difference: At that time, world leaders, celebrities and university students vigorously protested the slaughter and joined forces to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, in contrast, the world is distracted and silent. So the impunity is allowing violence to go unchecked, which, in turn, is producing what may become the worst famine in half a century or more.
“It’s beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” Cindy McCain, the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, told me. “It’s catastrophic.”
“Unless,” she added, “we can get our job done.”
World leaders will convene next week in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, but they have been mostly indifferent and are unlikely to get the job done. What’s needed is far greater pressure to end the civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the rival Arab militia, while pushing the warring parties to allow humanitarian access. All sides in the war are behaving irresponsibly, so more than half the people of Sudan — 25 million people — have become acutely malnourished already. A famine was formally declared in one area in Sudan in the summer.
Video ID 100000009704915
This is what I witnessed — and it shattered me.
Timmo Gaasbeek, a disaster expert who has modeled the crisis for a research institute in the Netherlands, told me that he foresees 13 million people starving to death in Sudan by October 2025, with a margin of error of two million. Such a toll would make this one of the worst famines in world history and the worst since the great Chinese famine of 65 years ago. By way of contrast, the famous Ukraine famine of the 1930s killed perhaps four million people, although estimates vary.
I can’t verify that a cataclysm of that level is approaching. Warring parties blocked me from entering Sudanese areas they controlled, so I reported along the Chad-Sudan border. Arriving refugees described starvation but not yet mass mortality from malnutrition.
All I can say is that whether or not a cataclysmic famine is probable, it is a significant risk. Those in danger are people like Thuraya Muhammad, a slight 17-year-old orphan who told me how her world unraveled when the Rapid Support Forces, the same group that killed Maryam’s five brothers, attacked her village and began burning homes and shooting men and boys.
“So many men were killed, like grains of sand,” she told me.
Image
A photograph of three children standing in front of wooden structures. A young boy drinks water from a metal boy held by a girl with her head covered.
When Thuraya Muhammad, an orphan because of Sudan’s war, doesn’t have enough food to feed her younger sister and brother, she gives them water to fill their stomachs.Credit...Nicholas Kristof
After slaughtering the men in Thuraya’s village, the militia raped many women and girls, she said. Thuraya’s cousin, a woman of 20, was among those kidnapped by the militia and hasn’t been seen since, she added.
Thuraya’s father was murdered by the militia and her mother had died earlier, so at 16 she was now the head of the household. She led her younger brother and two younger sisters to safety by walking to the Chadian border town of Adré. Gunmen tried to rob them several times, but the family had nothing left to steal.
Now in a refugee camp in Chad, Thuraya works to feed her siblings. Like other refugees, she gets a monthly food allotment from the World Food Program that helps but is insufficient. She supports her family by seeking day jobs washing clothes or cleaning houses (for about 25 cents a day). When she finds work, she and her siblings eat; if not, they may go hungry.
When I dropped by their hut, Thuraya had been unable to find work that day. A friendly neighbor had given her a cup of coffee, but she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day — and there was no prospect of dinner, either. If there is no food, Thuraya told me, she serves water to her siblings in place of dinner.
She wept.
Thuraya wasn’t crying from her own pangs of hunger. Rather, tears tumbled silently down her cheeks out of shame at her inability to feed her brother and sisters.
“When there isn’t enough food, I give it to my sisters and brother,” she told me, and her younger sister Fatima confirmed that. “I go hungry, or else my neighbors may call me over to eat with them.”
“I’d rather my sisters and brother eat, because they cry when they go hungry,” she said. “And I can’t bear to hear them cry.”
Fatima resists the favoritism and tries to give her sister back some food. But Thuraya won’t take it and goes out, telling her brother and sisters to eat while she finds something for herself. They all know that in a refugee camp of about 200,000 hungry people, she will find nothing.
I’m hoping that Thuraya’s fortitude might inspire President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with world leaders gathering at the United Nations, to summon a similar resolve to tackle slaughter and starvation in Sudan. Donor nations have contributed less than half the sum needed by U.N. agencies to ease Sudan’s food crisis, and they have not insisted forcefully on either providing humanitarian access or on cutting off the flow of weapons that sustains the war.
Biden, who 20 years ago savaged President George W. Bush for not doing enough to stop the Darfur genocide, has provided aid and appointed a special envoy to push for peace talks but has said little about the current crisis. An American partner, the United Arab Emirates, supplies weapons to the militia that slaughtered and raped Thuraya’s neighbors, yet Biden has not publicly demanded that the Emirates cut off that support for killers and rapists.
The upshot of this neglect is the risk not only of a horrendous famine but also of endless war, Sudan’s fragmentation, enormous refugee flows and instability across the region.
So as world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly tuck into fine banquets next week to celebrate their humanitarianism, may they be awakened by thoughts of an orphan of Darfur who ignores her own hunger and divides scraps of bread among her brother and sisters.
Thuraya has no reason to feel ashamed that her siblings are hungry; the shame belongs to those who are powerful, well fed and blind.
What question do you have about the civil war in Sudan and the people affected by it? What more would you like to know? Submit your question or critique in the field below and Nicholas Kristof will try to respond to a selection of queries in a future installment in this series.
We are no longer accepting submissions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Important And Thought Provoking Message
The Great Pager Detonation: The End of Phones and Computers on Airplanes?
By Michael Rubin
National Security Journal
September 17, 2024
Is “Operation Below the Belt” the End of Phones and Computers on Airplanes?:
Earlier today, some entity—presumably Israel—caused 3,000 pagers used by Hezbollah to detonate simultaneously.
It was a unique operation and demonstrated both Israel’s technological capabilities as well as its penetration of Hezbollah and Iranian networks.
After all, Iran supplied the pagers to Hezbollah just a few months ago.
The ramifications of the attack, however warranted it was, go far beyond the Middle East, however.
Wifi has become the norm on passenger planes. Whereas airlines once banned Samsung phones due to questions about their safety after reports that they overheated and still do not allow shipment of lithium batteries in the cargo hold, most passengers today bring laptops, cell phones, and tablets onboard flights.
Indeed, on most American aircraft, access to the entertainment system requires the passenger to use his phone, tablet, or computer.
The question for security experts—and certainly one on which Al Qaeda now works—is whether the operation presumably carried out against Hezbollah pagers could be replicated on American or European cell phones or other electronic equipment.
Put another way, who needs box cutters or an underwear bomb to bring down an aircraft if a signal could overheat, if not detonate a couple hundred tablets or phones at 30,000 feet above the Atlantic?
For 23 years, air travelers have had to limit their liquids and submit to vigorous pat-downs as the Transportation Security Agency or its European corollaries sought to protect travelers against the tactics of a past attack.
Today’s demonstration in Lebanon should raise red flags: Are water bottles or computers the greater threat? Do computers or phones have to be on to receive the signal that causes detonation? If not, will airlines ever accept such electronics in carry-on or cargo? If Wi-Fi is necessary to transmit the signal, is that the end of Wi-Fi on flights? And if passengers cannot do work on an aircraft, will they even fly or turn to video conferencing?
Hezbollah might have been today’s target, but today’s events may have the most profound impact on the aviation industry since 9/11.
The Great Pager Detonation: The End of Phones and Computers on Airplanes?
By Michael Rubin
National Security Journal
September 17, 2024
Is “Operation Below the Belt” the End of Phones and Computers on Airplanes?:
Earlier today, some entity—presumably Israel—caused 3,000 pagers used by Hezbollah to detonate simultaneously.
It was a unique operation and demonstrated both Israel’s technological capabilities as well as its penetration of Hezbollah and Iranian networks.
After all, Iran supplied the pagers to Hezbollah just a few months ago.
The ramifications of the attack, however warranted it was, go far beyond the Middle East, however.
Wifi has become the norm on passenger planes. Whereas airlines once banned Samsung phones due to questions about their safety after reports that they overheated and still do not allow shipment of lithium batteries in the cargo hold, most passengers today bring laptops, cell phones, and tablets onboard flights.
Indeed, on most American aircraft, access to the entertainment system requires the passenger to use his phone, tablet, or computer.
The question for security experts—and certainly one on which Al Qaeda now works—is whether the operation presumably carried out against Hezbollah pagers could be replicated on American or European cell phones or other electronic equipment.
Put another way, who needs box cutters or an underwear bomb to bring down an aircraft if a signal could overheat, if not detonate a couple hundred tablets or phones at 30,000 feet above the Atlantic?
For 23 years, air travelers have had to limit their liquids and submit to vigorous pat-downs as the Transportation Security Agency or its European corollaries sought to protect travelers against the tactics of a past attack.
Today’s demonstration in Lebanon should raise red flags: Are water bottles or computers the greater threat? Do computers or phones have to be on to receive the signal that causes detonation? If not, will airlines ever accept such electronics in carry-on or cargo? If Wi-Fi is necessary to transmit the signal, is that the end of Wi-Fi on flights? And if passengers cannot do work on an aircraft, will they even fly or turn to video conferencing?
Hezbollah might have been today’s target, but today’s events may have the most profound impact on the aviation industry since 9/11.
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Israel’s Pager Attacks Have Changed the World
Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.
Though the deadly operations were stunning, none of the elements used to carry them out were particularly new. The tactics employed by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied any role, to hijack an international supply chain and embed plastic explosives in Hezbollah devices have been used for years. What’s new is that Israel put them together in such a devastating and extravagantly public fashion, bringing into stark relief what the future of great power competition will look like — in peacetime, wartime and the ever expanding gray zone in between.
The targets won’t just be terrorists. Our computers are vulnerable, and increasingly, so are our cars, our refrigerators, our home thermostats and many other useful things in our orbits. Targets are everywhere.
The core component of the operation — implanting plastic explosives in pagers and radios — has been a terrorist risk since Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, tried to ignite some on an airplane in 2001. That’s what all of those airport scanners are designed to detect — both the ones you see at security checkpoints and the ones that later scan your luggage. Even a small amount can do an impressive degree of damage.
The second component, assassination by personal device, isn’t new, either. Israel used this tactic against a Hamas bomb maker in 1996 and a Fatah activist in 2000. Both were killed by remotely detonated booby-trapped cellphones.
The final and more logistically complex piece of Israel’s plan — attacking an international supply chain to compromise equipment at scale — is something that the United States has done itself, though for different purposes. The National Security Agency has intercepted communications equipment in transit and modified it, not for destructive purposes but for eavesdropping. We know from a Snowden document that the agency did this to a Cisco router destined for a Syrian telecommunications company. Presumably, this wasn’t the agency’s only operation of this type.
Creating a front company to fool victims isn’t even a new twist. Israel reportedly created a shell company to produce and sell explosive-laden devices to Hezbollah. In 2019, the F.B.I. created a company that sold supposedly secure cellphones to criminals — not to assassinate them, but to eavesdrop on and then arrest them.
The bottom line: Our supply chains are vulnerable, which means that we are vulnerable. Anyone — any country, any group, any individual — that interacts with a high-tech supply chain can potentially subvert the equipment passing through it. It could be subverted to eavesdrop. It could be subverted to degrade or fail on command. And, although it’s harder, it can be subverted to kill.
Personal devices connected to the internet — and countries in which they are in high use, such as the United States — are especially at risk. In 2007, the Idaho National Laboratory demonstrated that a cyberattack could cause a high-voltage generator to explode. In 2010, a computer virus believed to have been developed jointly by the United States and Israel destroyed centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear facility. A 2017 dump of C.I.A. documents included statements about the possibility of remotely hacking cars, which WikiLeaks asserted can be used to carry out “nearly undetectable assassinations.” This isn’t just theoretical: In 2015, a Wired reporter allowed hackers to remotely take over his car while he was driving it. They disabled the engine while he was on a highway.
The world has already begun to adjust to this threat. Many countries are increasingly wary of buying communications equipment from countries they don’t trust. The United States and others are banning large routers from the Chinese company Huawei because we fear that they could be used for eavesdropping and — even worse — disabled remotely in a time of escalating hostilities. In 2019 there was a minor panic over Chinese-made subway cars that could possibly have been modified to eavesdrop on their riders.
It’s not just finished equipment that is under the scanner. More than a decade ago, the U.S. military investigated the security risks of using Chinese parts in its equipment. In 2018, a Bloomberg report revealed U.S. investigators had accused China of modifying computer chips to steal information.
It’s not obvious how to defend against these and similar attacks. Our high-tech supply chains are complex and international. It didn’t raise any red flags to Hezbollah that the group’s pagers came from a Hungary-based company that sourced them from Taiwan, because that sort of thing is perfectly normal. Most of the electronics Americans buy come from overseas, including our iPhones, whose parts come from dozens of countries before being pieced together primarily in China.
That’s a hard problem to fix. We can’t imagine Washington passing a law requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States. Labor costs are too high, and our country doesn’t have the domestic capacity to make these things. Our supply chains are deeply, inexorably international, and changing that would require bringing global economies back to the 1980s.
So what happens now? As for Hezbollah, its leaders and operatives will no longer be able to trust equipment connected to a network — very likely one of the primary goals of the attacks. And the world will have to wait to see if there are any long-term effects of this attack, or how the group will respond.
But now that the line has been crossed, other countries will almost certainly start to consider this sort of tactic as within bounds. It could be deployed against a military during a war, or against civilians in the run-up to a war. And developed countries like the United States will be especially vulnerable, simply because of the sheer number of vulnerable devices we have.
More on the attacks in Lebanon
Opinion | Michael Walzer
Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/opin ... latedLinks
Sept. 21, 2024
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
America’s Role in the World Is Hard. It Just Got Much Harder. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/opin ... latedLinks
Sept. 17, 2024
Opinion | Ezra Klein
Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — and Itself https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/opin ... latedLinks
Sept. 20, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/22/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.
Though the deadly operations were stunning, none of the elements used to carry them out were particularly new. The tactics employed by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied any role, to hijack an international supply chain and embed plastic explosives in Hezbollah devices have been used for years. What’s new is that Israel put them together in such a devastating and extravagantly public fashion, bringing into stark relief what the future of great power competition will look like — in peacetime, wartime and the ever expanding gray zone in between.
The targets won’t just be terrorists. Our computers are vulnerable, and increasingly, so are our cars, our refrigerators, our home thermostats and many other useful things in our orbits. Targets are everywhere.
The core component of the operation — implanting plastic explosives in pagers and radios — has been a terrorist risk since Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, tried to ignite some on an airplane in 2001. That’s what all of those airport scanners are designed to detect — both the ones you see at security checkpoints and the ones that later scan your luggage. Even a small amount can do an impressive degree of damage.
The second component, assassination by personal device, isn’t new, either. Israel used this tactic against a Hamas bomb maker in 1996 and a Fatah activist in 2000. Both were killed by remotely detonated booby-trapped cellphones.
The final and more logistically complex piece of Israel’s plan — attacking an international supply chain to compromise equipment at scale — is something that the United States has done itself, though for different purposes. The National Security Agency has intercepted communications equipment in transit and modified it, not for destructive purposes but for eavesdropping. We know from a Snowden document that the agency did this to a Cisco router destined for a Syrian telecommunications company. Presumably, this wasn’t the agency’s only operation of this type.
Creating a front company to fool victims isn’t even a new twist. Israel reportedly created a shell company to produce and sell explosive-laden devices to Hezbollah. In 2019, the F.B.I. created a company that sold supposedly secure cellphones to criminals — not to assassinate them, but to eavesdrop on and then arrest them.
The bottom line: Our supply chains are vulnerable, which means that we are vulnerable. Anyone — any country, any group, any individual — that interacts with a high-tech supply chain can potentially subvert the equipment passing through it. It could be subverted to eavesdrop. It could be subverted to degrade or fail on command. And, although it’s harder, it can be subverted to kill.
Personal devices connected to the internet — and countries in which they are in high use, such as the United States — are especially at risk. In 2007, the Idaho National Laboratory demonstrated that a cyberattack could cause a high-voltage generator to explode. In 2010, a computer virus believed to have been developed jointly by the United States and Israel destroyed centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear facility. A 2017 dump of C.I.A. documents included statements about the possibility of remotely hacking cars, which WikiLeaks asserted can be used to carry out “nearly undetectable assassinations.” This isn’t just theoretical: In 2015, a Wired reporter allowed hackers to remotely take over his car while he was driving it. They disabled the engine while he was on a highway.
The world has already begun to adjust to this threat. Many countries are increasingly wary of buying communications equipment from countries they don’t trust. The United States and others are banning large routers from the Chinese company Huawei because we fear that they could be used for eavesdropping and — even worse — disabled remotely in a time of escalating hostilities. In 2019 there was a minor panic over Chinese-made subway cars that could possibly have been modified to eavesdrop on their riders.
It’s not just finished equipment that is under the scanner. More than a decade ago, the U.S. military investigated the security risks of using Chinese parts in its equipment. In 2018, a Bloomberg report revealed U.S. investigators had accused China of modifying computer chips to steal information.
It’s not obvious how to defend against these and similar attacks. Our high-tech supply chains are complex and international. It didn’t raise any red flags to Hezbollah that the group’s pagers came from a Hungary-based company that sourced them from Taiwan, because that sort of thing is perfectly normal. Most of the electronics Americans buy come from overseas, including our iPhones, whose parts come from dozens of countries before being pieced together primarily in China.
That’s a hard problem to fix. We can’t imagine Washington passing a law requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States. Labor costs are too high, and our country doesn’t have the domestic capacity to make these things. Our supply chains are deeply, inexorably international, and changing that would require bringing global economies back to the 1980s.
So what happens now? As for Hezbollah, its leaders and operatives will no longer be able to trust equipment connected to a network — very likely one of the primary goals of the attacks. And the world will have to wait to see if there are any long-term effects of this attack, or how the group will respond.
But now that the line has been crossed, other countries will almost certainly start to consider this sort of tactic as within bounds. It could be deployed against a military during a war, or against civilians in the run-up to a war. And developed countries like the United States will be especially vulnerable, simply because of the sheer number of vulnerable devices we have.
More on the attacks in Lebanon
Opinion | Michael Walzer
Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/opin ... latedLinks
Sept. 21, 2024
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
America’s Role in the World Is Hard. It Just Got Much Harder. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/opin ... latedLinks
Sept. 17, 2024
Opinion | Ezra Klein
Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — and Itself https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/opin ... latedLinks
Sept. 20, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/22/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Nearly a Million Civilians Flee War in Lebanon, U.N. Says
A week into the ground war between Israel and Hezbollah, shelters in Lebanon are filling up beyond capacity, humanitarian officials warned.
Emergency personnel at work after a fire at a residential building caused by a rocket fired from Lebanon, in Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, on Wednesday.Credit...Ammar Awad/Reuters
By Aaron BoxermanAryn BakerBen Hubbard and Alan Yuhas
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Ben Hubbard from Istanbul.
Published Oct. 9, 2024
Updated Oct. 10, 2024, 3:35 a.m. ET
Hezbollah militants fired rockets at Israeli towns and fought ground battles with Israeli troops in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, as the United Nations warned that nearly a million Lebanese had fled the spreading war between Israel and Iranian-backed groups in the Middle East.
In a sign of the war’s growing scale, Israeli evacuation orders now cover a quarter of Lebanon’s land area, according to the United Nations, which says the calls have sent people fleeing from more than a hundred villages and urban areas.
“To the people of South Lebanon: Be careful!” an Israeli military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, said on Wednesday in an Arabic language warning posted online. Israeli forces, he said, were continuing “to attack Hezbollah sites in and near your village, and for your own safety you are prohibited from returning to your homes until further notice.”
More than 600,000 people of Lebanon’s 5.4 million have been displaced within the country, threatening to overwhelm shelters, U.N. officials warned, and 300,000 others have fled abroad. Half of Lebanon’s public schools have been turned into shelters, the aid group Save the Children said on Wednesday.
Image
A woman dishing up food for people who have been displaced by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
Delivering meals to displaced people taking refuge at a school in Beirut on Wednesday. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Displaced people have set up tents on white-sand beaches where vacationers once sunbathed, and people have taken refuge not only in schools but in parks, unfinished buildings and at least one nightclub.
“The humanitarian impact is absolutely dire,” Duncan Sullivan, the program leader of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration, said on Wednesday.
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//Our Photographers in Israel and Gaza on the Images They Can’t ForgetOct. 7, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/worl ... hotos.html
The war began just over a year ago after Hamas militants led an attack into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces moved to destroy Hamas there, but when Hezbollah quickly joined the fight from the north, firing rockets into Israel, Israel found itself engaged in hostilities at another border.
Over the months that followed, the exchanges of fire displaced tens of thousands of people in Lebanon and Israel. Then Israeli ground troops crossed the border.
Image
Several square tents have been occupy a patch of shoreline.
Tents have been set up on a beach as temporary shelters in Lebanon.Credit...Bilal Hussein/Associated Press
Israeli military officials have described the invasion as limited, saying it is aimed at clearing the border area of Hezbollah fighters and weapons.
//Middle East Crisis: Live Updates
Updated
Oct. 9, 2024, 2:45 p.m. ETOct. 9, 2024
//Israeli strikes in Lebanon are driving widespread displacement and a humanitarian crisis, the U.N. says. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/09 ... iebanon-un
//Conditions in northern Gaza worsen amid intense Israeli military activity. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/09 ... y-activity
//Biden and Netanyahu speak for the first time in nearly 2 months as Mideast crisis deepens. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/09 ... ahu-israel
Even as they fight in the north, Israeli forces have continued their battle in Gaza, and have also stepped up military action in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At least four people were killed there, in Nablus, on Wednesday in a raid by undercover Israeli forces, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry and the Israeli police.
But it is the tensions between Israel and Iran — the sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah — that have done the most in recent days to keep the region on edge. A week after Iran unleashed a barrage of missiles at Israel, its allies and adversaries alike are waiting to see what happens next.
On Wednesday, the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, issued a new warning on Iran.
“Our attack will be deadly, precise and above all surprising,” he said. “Whoever attempts to hurt the State of Israel will pay the price.”
American officials, worried about an uncontrolled escalation, were caught off-guard by Israel’s recent onslaught against Hezbollah, and stymied in their efforts to broker a cease-fire both in that conflict and in the war in Gaza.
Image
A damaged building after an airstrike.
A building hit by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.Credit...Fabio Bucciarelli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Relations between the allies have been seriously strained. On Wednesday, for the first time in two months, President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke by phone.
Iran has also sought to shore up relations with its Arab neighbors this week, dispatching its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, on a tour that included some of the United States’ closest partners in the region. On Wednesday, he visited one such partner: Saudi Arabia, a longtime Iranian rival.
Before Mr. Araghchi set out from Tehran, he said Iran did not want war with Israel but that it was prepared to strike back if attacked. He also said Iran would continue its support of militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, a network that calls itself the “axis of resistance.”
Hezbollah has been battered by Israel’s assaults over the last three weeks, but the group still has a formidable arsenal.
A Hezbollah missile barrage on Wednesday killed two people in the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s emergency services said. And six people were wounded by shrapnel after a rocket hit a bypass road near the northern city of Haifa, the Israeli military said.
The volley followed another night of Israeli airstrikes in the densely populated areas near Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway, and an Israeli strike near the Iranian Embassy in Syria.
Image
A group of people prepared to travel with suitcases, bags and backpacks.
Turkish citizens living in Lebanon gather as they prepare to evacuate via the Beirut port on Wednesday.Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock
More than 800 of Lebanon’s 990 shelters are already full, according to the government, and the few that do have room are often too remote for residents to reach, said Mr. Sullivan, the U.N. official. Some have only one or two toilets for a hundred people, and lack electricity, adequate lighting or safe areas for women and children.
The European Union also announced it was dispatching three planes loaded with humanitarian aid to Beirut.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Euan Ward contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/worl ... 778d3e6de3
A week into the ground war between Israel and Hezbollah, shelters in Lebanon are filling up beyond capacity, humanitarian officials warned.
Emergency personnel at work after a fire at a residential building caused by a rocket fired from Lebanon, in Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, on Wednesday.Credit...Ammar Awad/Reuters
By Aaron BoxermanAryn BakerBen Hubbard and Alan Yuhas
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Ben Hubbard from Istanbul.
Published Oct. 9, 2024
Updated Oct. 10, 2024, 3:35 a.m. ET
Hezbollah militants fired rockets at Israeli towns and fought ground battles with Israeli troops in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, as the United Nations warned that nearly a million Lebanese had fled the spreading war between Israel and Iranian-backed groups in the Middle East.
In a sign of the war’s growing scale, Israeli evacuation orders now cover a quarter of Lebanon’s land area, according to the United Nations, which says the calls have sent people fleeing from more than a hundred villages and urban areas.
“To the people of South Lebanon: Be careful!” an Israeli military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, said on Wednesday in an Arabic language warning posted online. Israeli forces, he said, were continuing “to attack Hezbollah sites in and near your village, and for your own safety you are prohibited from returning to your homes until further notice.”
More than 600,000 people of Lebanon’s 5.4 million have been displaced within the country, threatening to overwhelm shelters, U.N. officials warned, and 300,000 others have fled abroad. Half of Lebanon’s public schools have been turned into shelters, the aid group Save the Children said on Wednesday.
Image
A woman dishing up food for people who have been displaced by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
Delivering meals to displaced people taking refuge at a school in Beirut on Wednesday. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Displaced people have set up tents on white-sand beaches where vacationers once sunbathed, and people have taken refuge not only in schools but in parks, unfinished buildings and at least one nightclub.
“The humanitarian impact is absolutely dire,” Duncan Sullivan, the program leader of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration, said on Wednesday.
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The war began just over a year ago after Hamas militants led an attack into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces moved to destroy Hamas there, but when Hezbollah quickly joined the fight from the north, firing rockets into Israel, Israel found itself engaged in hostilities at another border.
Over the months that followed, the exchanges of fire displaced tens of thousands of people in Lebanon and Israel. Then Israeli ground troops crossed the border.
Image
Several square tents have been occupy a patch of shoreline.
Tents have been set up on a beach as temporary shelters in Lebanon.Credit...Bilal Hussein/Associated Press
Israeli military officials have described the invasion as limited, saying it is aimed at clearing the border area of Hezbollah fighters and weapons.
//Middle East Crisis: Live Updates
Updated
Oct. 9, 2024, 2:45 p.m. ETOct. 9, 2024
//Israeli strikes in Lebanon are driving widespread displacement and a humanitarian crisis, the U.N. says. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/09 ... iebanon-un
//Conditions in northern Gaza worsen amid intense Israeli military activity. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/09 ... y-activity
//Biden and Netanyahu speak for the first time in nearly 2 months as Mideast crisis deepens. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/09 ... ahu-israel
Even as they fight in the north, Israeli forces have continued their battle in Gaza, and have also stepped up military action in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At least four people were killed there, in Nablus, on Wednesday in a raid by undercover Israeli forces, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry and the Israeli police.
But it is the tensions between Israel and Iran — the sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah — that have done the most in recent days to keep the region on edge. A week after Iran unleashed a barrage of missiles at Israel, its allies and adversaries alike are waiting to see what happens next.
On Wednesday, the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, issued a new warning on Iran.
“Our attack will be deadly, precise and above all surprising,” he said. “Whoever attempts to hurt the State of Israel will pay the price.”
American officials, worried about an uncontrolled escalation, were caught off-guard by Israel’s recent onslaught against Hezbollah, and stymied in their efforts to broker a cease-fire both in that conflict and in the war in Gaza.
Image
A damaged building after an airstrike.
A building hit by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.Credit...Fabio Bucciarelli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Relations between the allies have been seriously strained. On Wednesday, for the first time in two months, President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke by phone.
Iran has also sought to shore up relations with its Arab neighbors this week, dispatching its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, on a tour that included some of the United States’ closest partners in the region. On Wednesday, he visited one such partner: Saudi Arabia, a longtime Iranian rival.
Before Mr. Araghchi set out from Tehran, he said Iran did not want war with Israel but that it was prepared to strike back if attacked. He also said Iran would continue its support of militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, a network that calls itself the “axis of resistance.”
Hezbollah has been battered by Israel’s assaults over the last three weeks, but the group still has a formidable arsenal.
A Hezbollah missile barrage on Wednesday killed two people in the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s emergency services said. And six people were wounded by shrapnel after a rocket hit a bypass road near the northern city of Haifa, the Israeli military said.
The volley followed another night of Israeli airstrikes in the densely populated areas near Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway, and an Israeli strike near the Iranian Embassy in Syria.
Image
A group of people prepared to travel with suitcases, bags and backpacks.
Turkish citizens living in Lebanon gather as they prepare to evacuate via the Beirut port on Wednesday.Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock
More than 800 of Lebanon’s 990 shelters are already full, according to the government, and the few that do have room are often too remote for residents to reach, said Mr. Sullivan, the U.N. official. Some have only one or two toilets for a hundred people, and lack electricity, adequate lighting or safe areas for women and children.
The European Union also announced it was dispatching three planes loaded with humanitarian aid to Beirut.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Euan Ward contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Fuel Tanker Explosion Leaves at Least 150 Dead in Nigeria
Residents of a nearby town went to scoop up gasoline that had spilled from an overturned tanker, but then it exploded, setting off an inferno. Several similar disasters have taken place in recent years.
Carrying a body for a funeral after a fuel tanker explosion in Majia, Nigeria, on Wednesday.Credit...Sani Maikatanga/Associated Press
More than 150 people were killed in northern Nigeria on Tuesday after an overturned fuel tanker exploded, according to a police spokesman, in one of the deadliest road disasters ever recorded in Africa’s most populous country.
While the death toll was exceptionally high, the episode followed an all-too-common pattern on Nigeria’s roads: a truck driver lost control of a fuel tanker, and people rushed in to collect the spilled gasoline from the overturned vehicle. Shortly after, an explosion turned into a deadly inferno.
As residents in the town of Majia, where the explosion occurred, mourned their dead on Wednesday during a day of mass burials, more than 100 injured people remained hospitalized, according to the police spokesman, Lawan Shiisu.
Two emergency services officials said the preliminary death toll would probably rise.
“Multiple households have suffered devastating casualties, losing more than one family member,” said Mu’azu Rabiu, a resident of Majia who witnessed the disaster.
On Wednesday, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said that a review of safety measures for fuel transportation nationwide would be conducted in the wake of the episode, according to a statement shared by the Nigerian presidency.
Mr. Tinubu also said that nighttime travel protocols would be intensified, the statement read.
Fuel tanker explosions make up a small portion of reported road-related deaths in Nigeria, a country of about 220 million people where more than 5,000 people died and 31,000 others were injured in traffic accidents last year, according to government data.
Poorly maintained roads, aging vehicles and loosely enforced safety regulations, like a lack of adherence to speed limits, are among the main causes.
Image
Black smoke is seen above a raging fire.
A photograph posted on social media purporting to show the aftermath of the explosion.Credit...via Reuters
But fuel tanker explosions kill bystanders and pedestrians, while injuring others with severe burns.
In early September, at least 59 people died when a passenger truck and two other vehicles hit a toppled-over fuel tanker that had caught fire. In April, more than 100 vehicles burned in a similar explosion. And in July last year, at least eight people died as they were trying to siphon fuel from an overturned truck in the country’s southwest.
The disaster on Tuesday night was set off when the driver of a fuel tanker swerved to avoid colliding with a truck on an expressway in the northern state of Jigawa, according to Mr. Shiisu, the police spokesman.
The tanker overturned near Majia, spilling fuel onto the roadway. Local residents rushed to scoop it up in what seemed like an easy way to collect an increasingly expensive commodity in Nigeria.
Fuel prices have more than tripled over the last year as Mr. Tinubu’s administration has moved to abandon a costly government fuel subsidy that for decades gave Nigerians access to some of the cheapest gasoline in Africa.
Higher fuel prices have been a key factor behind nationwide protests over the rising cost of living that have embroiled Nigeria for months.
Image
A damaged fuel tanker lies on its side on a road in Nigeria.
The scene of the fuel tanker explosion in Majia on Wednesday.Credit...Sani Maikatanga/Associated Press
On Tuesday, despite police warnings and attempts to cordon off the area around the overturned tanker, many people gathered to collect the spilled fuel in the dark, according to Mr. Shiisu.
“The tanker, loaded with petrol, ignited shortly after the crash, causing an inferno that engulfed numerous people in the vicinity,” Mr. Shiisu said.
Videos shared by Nigerian news outlets showed a truck engulfed in flames and a trail of fire along the road.
According to a World Health Organization report published this year, sub-Saharan African countries accounted for nearly 20 percent of road fatalities globally in 2021, even though they hold only 3 percent of the world’s vehicles.
Last month, the Nigerian government introduced a mobile app designed to prevent road accidents in the country. The fuel tanker explosion on Tuesday was at least the second road accident to cause dozens of deaths since then.
Image
People stand over bodies covered in shrouds at a gravesite.
People preparing bodies for burial in Majia on Wednesday.Credit...Sani Maikatanga/Associated Press
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Residents of a nearby town went to scoop up gasoline that had spilled from an overturned tanker, but then it exploded, setting off an inferno. Several similar disasters have taken place in recent years.
Carrying a body for a funeral after a fuel tanker explosion in Majia, Nigeria, on Wednesday.Credit...Sani Maikatanga/Associated Press
More than 150 people were killed in northern Nigeria on Tuesday after an overturned fuel tanker exploded, according to a police spokesman, in one of the deadliest road disasters ever recorded in Africa’s most populous country.
While the death toll was exceptionally high, the episode followed an all-too-common pattern on Nigeria’s roads: a truck driver lost control of a fuel tanker, and people rushed in to collect the spilled gasoline from the overturned vehicle. Shortly after, an explosion turned into a deadly inferno.
As residents in the town of Majia, where the explosion occurred, mourned their dead on Wednesday during a day of mass burials, more than 100 injured people remained hospitalized, according to the police spokesman, Lawan Shiisu.
Two emergency services officials said the preliminary death toll would probably rise.
“Multiple households have suffered devastating casualties, losing more than one family member,” said Mu’azu Rabiu, a resident of Majia who witnessed the disaster.
On Wednesday, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said that a review of safety measures for fuel transportation nationwide would be conducted in the wake of the episode, according to a statement shared by the Nigerian presidency.
Mr. Tinubu also said that nighttime travel protocols would be intensified, the statement read.
Fuel tanker explosions make up a small portion of reported road-related deaths in Nigeria, a country of about 220 million people where more than 5,000 people died and 31,000 others were injured in traffic accidents last year, according to government data.
Poorly maintained roads, aging vehicles and loosely enforced safety regulations, like a lack of adherence to speed limits, are among the main causes.
Image
Black smoke is seen above a raging fire.
A photograph posted on social media purporting to show the aftermath of the explosion.Credit...via Reuters
But fuel tanker explosions kill bystanders and pedestrians, while injuring others with severe burns.
In early September, at least 59 people died when a passenger truck and two other vehicles hit a toppled-over fuel tanker that had caught fire. In April, more than 100 vehicles burned in a similar explosion. And in July last year, at least eight people died as they were trying to siphon fuel from an overturned truck in the country’s southwest.
The disaster on Tuesday night was set off when the driver of a fuel tanker swerved to avoid colliding with a truck on an expressway in the northern state of Jigawa, according to Mr. Shiisu, the police spokesman.
The tanker overturned near Majia, spilling fuel onto the roadway. Local residents rushed to scoop it up in what seemed like an easy way to collect an increasingly expensive commodity in Nigeria.
Fuel prices have more than tripled over the last year as Mr. Tinubu’s administration has moved to abandon a costly government fuel subsidy that for decades gave Nigerians access to some of the cheapest gasoline in Africa.
Higher fuel prices have been a key factor behind nationwide protests over the rising cost of living that have embroiled Nigeria for months.
Image
A damaged fuel tanker lies on its side on a road in Nigeria.
The scene of the fuel tanker explosion in Majia on Wednesday.Credit...Sani Maikatanga/Associated Press
On Tuesday, despite police warnings and attempts to cordon off the area around the overturned tanker, many people gathered to collect the spilled fuel in the dark, according to Mr. Shiisu.
“The tanker, loaded with petrol, ignited shortly after the crash, causing an inferno that engulfed numerous people in the vicinity,” Mr. Shiisu said.
Videos shared by Nigerian news outlets showed a truck engulfed in flames and a trail of fire along the road.
According to a World Health Organization report published this year, sub-Saharan African countries accounted for nearly 20 percent of road fatalities globally in 2021, even though they hold only 3 percent of the world’s vehicles.
Last month, the Nigerian government introduced a mobile app designed to prevent road accidents in the country. The fuel tanker explosion on Tuesday was at least the second road accident to cause dozens of deaths since then.
Image
People stand over bodies covered in shrouds at a gravesite.
People preparing bodies for burial in Majia on Wednesday.Credit...Sani Maikatanga/Associated Press
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
VIDEO: Four-storey building collapses in Tanzania’s Kariakoo: Rescue operations ongoing
By Salome Gregory
Mwananchi Communication Ltd
What you need to know:
Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner Albert Chalamila has urged the public to remain calm, assuring that rescue operations are being conducted to locate and assist victims
Video, photos and more at : https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... ng-4825356
Kariakoo multi-storey buildings a time bomb: https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... mb-2500238
What you need to know:
The inspector came across a list of shortcomings such as absence of parking spaces, failure by developers to show test results of materials workers being on the site without protective gears and without formal contracts.
By Salome Gregory
Mwananchi Communication Ltd
What you need to know:
Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner Albert Chalamila has urged the public to remain calm, assuring that rescue operations are being conducted to locate and assist victims
Video, photos and more at : https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... ng-4825356
Kariakoo multi-storey buildings a time bomb: https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/n ... mb-2500238
What you need to know:
The inspector came across a list of shortcomings such as absence of parking spaces, failure by developers to show test results of materials workers being on the site without protective gears and without formal contracts.