BAR ELIAS, LEBANON: At the entrance of a rural town in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, a blue sign says “Welcome to Bar Elias, population 50,000” but in the past six years, that number has more than doubled with Syrians seeking shelter from the war across the border.
“They are our guests,” said Mayor Mawas Araji. “But we don’t have the capacity to serve them as we should.”
The refugee crisis has drained public services in the historically poor area in Lebanon’s farming heartland, Araji said. Yet perhaps the most glaring strain has been the garbage mountain rising among the hills, or the open water canals overflowing with trash in the winter.
With the influx of people, Bar Elias now handles 40 extra tons of refuse every day, in a country that already had no national waste disposal plan.
Since the Syrian conflict began in 2011, at least 1.5 million people have poured into Lebanon — around a quarter of the country’s population — where most languish in severe poverty.
Makeshift settlements have popped up all around the country as the Lebanese government has long rejected setting up refugee camps.
To stem the flow of Syrians making the perilous journey to Europe by boat, the EU has funneled billions into Syria’s neighboring countries, giving Lebanon €147 million ($157 ) between 2014 and 2016.
For government officials, the need for foreign funding is clear in cases like Bar Elias, where aid groups have warned of dire environmental hazards. The EU funded a €4.5 million ($4.8 million) waste management facility set to open next month in the town, around 12 km from the Syrian border.
The massive hangar will process 150 tons of waste daily from Bar Elias and two nearby towns, creating several jobs, Araji said. “For us, this was a dream.”
Nestled between the fields of Bar Elias, Hassan Ibrahim, 62, lives amid hundreds of cramped tents pitched haphazardly in the mud.
“We’ve appointed someone here to collect the garbage ... so when the municipality comes, everything is ready,” said Ibrahim, who escaped shelling in Aleppo five years ago.
But in another makeshift camp a few streets away, Maamar Al-Alawi seems less cheerful. Across from her tent, a large cesspit is brimming with sewage water and rubbish.
During heavy rainfall, the gutters also spill over with floating plastic bags.
“It’s all garbage on top of garbage,” said Al-Alawi, who cleans around her family’s spot every day in vain. “You go into the tent, and it stinks.”
As well as the dangers of open dump sites and burning waste, trash also often fills irrigation canals that feed nearby vegetable fields, according to the EU-funded agency that designed the Bar Elias facility.
Lebanon has been plagued by a waste disposal crisis, regardless of refugees, with politicians repeatedly failing to agree a solution, sparking several mass protests in recent years.
On a recent visit to the Bekaa, European Commissioner Johannes Hahn said the EU was “trying to do our best to resolve the Syrian crisis.”
“But I’m a realistic man,” he added. “And I have to do first things first” by helping fill Lebanon’s shortages.
The new Bar Elias facility represents a prototype that should become part of broader national plans for development, said Ziad El-Sayegh, senior national policy adviser for Lebanon’s Ministry of the Displaced.
Ministries had been putting together a “master plan for all the infrastructure” but could not undertake it without outside support, he said.
“The government has an enormous deficit, and then on top of that, add the weight of the refugee crisis,” El-Sayegh said.
Lebanese officials will take their vision for such a plan to Brussels next week, highlighting how the refugee crisis has strained Lebanon’s already crumbling infrastructure.
Prime Minister Saad Al-Hariri, who has been trying to drag Lebanon out of institutional paralysis since he was appointed in November, said the plan would “equally benefit Lebanese citizens and displaced Syrians.”
In Lebanese town, mounting trash shows strain of refugees
In Lebanese town, mounting trash shows strain of refugees
UN denounces 'intimidation and harassment' of lawyers in Tunisia
GENEVA: The United Nations on Friday denounced recent arrests of lawyers in Tunisia, saying the detentions, which have also included journalists and political commentators, undermined the rule of law in the North Africa country.
"Reported raids in the past week on the Tunisia Bar Association undermine the rule of law and violate international standards on the protection of the independence and function of lawyers," Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told reporters in Geneva.
"Such actions constitute forms of intimidation and harassment."
Lebanon state media reports fresh Israeli strikes in south
The Iran-backed group, a Hamas ally, has traded cross-border fire with Israeli forces almost daily since the Palestinian group’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, now in its eighth month.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said “Israeli strikes targeted Najjariyeh and Addousiyeh,” two adjacent villages about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the Israeli border just south of the coastal city of Sidon.
The NNA reported “victims” without elaborating, and an AFP photographer saw ambulances heading to the targeted sites.
The strikes hit a pickup truck in Najjariyeh and an orchard, the photographer said.
Hezbollah — which has intensified its cross-border attacks in recent days, prompting Israeli strikes deeper into Lebanese territory — announced Friday it had launched “attack drones” on Israeli military positions.
It came a day after the powerful Lebanese group said it had attacked an army position in Metula, a border town in northern Israel, wounding three soldiers.
Hezbollah said the attack was carried out with an “attack drone carrying two S5 rockets,” which are normally launched from jets.
Also on Thursday the group announced the deaths of two of its fighters in Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon. The NNA said they were killed when their car was targeted.
Hezbollah earlier on Thursday said it had launched dozens of Katyusha rockets at Israeli positions in the annexed Golan Heights.
Israel retaliated with overnight air raids on Lebanon’s eastern Baalbek region, a Hezbollah stronghold near the Syrian border.
Earlier this week Hezbollah said it had targeted an Israeli base near Tiberias, about 30 kilometers from the Lebanese border — one of the group’s deepest attacks into Israeli territory since clashes began on October 8.
The Wednesday strike came a day after the death of a Hezbollah member, which Israel said was a field commander, in an attack on southern Lebanon.
The cross-border fighting has killed at least 415 people in Lebanon, mostly militants but also including 80 civilians, according to an AFP tally.
Israel says 14 soldiers and 10 civilians have been killed on its side of the border.
UN rights chief warns Sudan commanders of catastrophe in Al-Fashir
- Violence escalated near Sudan’s Al-Fashir this week
GENEVA: The UN human rights chief said on Friday he was “horrified” by escalating violence near Sudan’s Al-Fashir and held discussions this week with commanders from both sides of the conflict, warning of a humanitarian disaster if the city is attacked.
“The High Commissioner (Volker Turk) warned both commanders that fighting in (al-Fashir), where more than 1.8 million residents and internally displaced people are currently encircled and at imminent risk of famine, would have a catastrophic impact on civilians, and would deepen intercommunal conflict with disastrous humanitarian consequences,” said Ravina Shamdasani, Turk’s spokesperson, at a Geneva press briefing.
Israel to top UN court: Gaza war ‘tragic’ but ‘no genocide’
- Israel lashed at South Africa’s case before the UN’s top court, describing it as “totally divorced” from reality
- Pretoria has urged the ICJ to order a stop to the Israeli assault on the Gaza city of Rafah
THE HAGUE: A top lawyer for Israel told the highest United Nations court on Friday that the war in Gaza was tragic but denied there was a case of genocide to answer.
“There is a tragic war going on but there is no genocide,” Gilad Noam told the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Israel lashed out Friday at South Africa’s case before the UN’s top court, describing it as “totally divorced” from reality, as Pretoria urges judges to order a ceasefire in Gaza.
A top lawyer for Israel painted the South Africa case as a “mockery” of the UN Genocide Convention that it is accused of breaching.
“South Africa presents the court for the fourth time with a picture that is completely divorced from the facts and circumstances,” Gilad Noam told the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Pretoria has urged the ICJ to order a stop to the Israeli assault on the Gaza city of Rafah, which Israel says is key to eliminating Hamas militants.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Thursday that the ground assault on Rafah was a “critical” part of the army’s mission to destroy Hamas and prevent any repetition of the October 7 attack.
“The battle in Rafah is critical... It’s not just the rest of their battalions, it’s also like an oxygen line for them for escape and resupply,” he said.
Netanyahu ordered the Rafah offensive in defiance of US warnings that more than a million civilians sheltering there could be caught in the crossfire.
Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday that the operation in Rafah “will continue as additional forces will enter” the area.
Friday in the Hague, Noam told the court that “Israel is acutely aware of the large number of civilians concentrated in Rafah. It is also acutely aware of Hamas efforts to use these civilians as a shield.”
Noam said there had been no “large-scale” assault on Rafah but “specific and localized operations prefaced with evacuation efforts and support for humanitarian activities.”
Israel denies South Africa’s allegations
On Thursday, judges heard a litany of allegations against Israel from lawyers representing Pretoria, including mass graves, torture and deliberate withholding of humanitarian aid.
“South Africa had hoped, when we last appeared before this court, to halt this genocidal process to preserve Palestine and its people,” said top lawyer Vusimuzi Madonsela.
“Instead, Israel’s genocide has continued apace and has just reached a new and horrific stage,” added Madonsela.
But Noam said that South Africa’s accusations made a “mockery of the heinous charge of genocide.”
“Calling something a genocide again and again does not make it genocide. Repeating a lie does not make it true,” he said.
Court hearings
In a ruling that made headlines around the world, the ICJ in January ordered Israel to do everything in its power to prevent genocidal acts and enable humanitarian aid to Gaza.
But the court stopped short of ordering a ceasefire and South Africa’s argument is that the situation on the ground — notably the operation in the crowded city of Rafah — requires fresh ICJ action.
The orders of the ICJ, which rules in disputes between states, are legally binding but it has little means to enforce them.
It has ordered Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine, to no avail.
South Africa wants the ICJ to issue three emergency orders — “provisional measures” in court jargon — while it rules on the wider accusation that Israel is breaking the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
It wants the court to order Israel to “immediately” cease all military operations in Gaza, including in Rafah, enable humanitarian access and report back on its progress on achieving these orders.
The arrival of occasional aid convoys has slowed to a trickle since Israeli forces took control last week of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing.
Israel’s military operations in Gaza were launched in retaliation for Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Militants also seized about 250 hostages, 128 of whom Israel estimates remain in Gaza, including 36 the military says are dead.
Israel’s military has conducted a relentless bombardment from the air and a ground offensive inside Gaza that has killed at least 35,303 people, mostly civilians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
Houthis say they downed US MQ-9 drone over Yemen’s Maareb
DUBAI: Yemen’s Houthi rebels on Friday claimed to have shot down an American drone, hours after footage circulated online of what appeared to be the wreckage of an MQ-9 Predator drone. The US military did not immediately acknowledge the incident.
If confirmed, this would be yet another Predator downed by the Houthis as they press their campaign over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree claimed that rebels shot down the Predator on Thursday with a surface-to-air missile, promising to later release footage of the attack. He described the drone as “carrying out hostile actions” in Yemen’s Marib province, which remains held by allies of Yemen’s exiled, internationally recognized government.
Online video showed wreckage resembling the pieces of the Predator, as well as footage of that wreckage on fire.
The US military did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press over the Houthi claim. While the rebels have made claims about attacks that turned out later not to be true, they have a history of shooting down US drones and have been armed by their main benefactor, Iran, with weapons capable of high-altitude attack.
Since the Houthis seized the country’s north and its capital of Sanaa in 2014, the US military has previously lost at least five drones to the rebels.
Reapers, which cost around $30 million apiece, can fly at altitudes up to 50,000 feet and have an endurance of up to 24 hours before needing to land.
The drone shootdown comes as the Houthis launch attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, demanding Israel ends the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians there. The war began after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking some 250 others hostage.
The Houthis have launched more than 50 attacks on shipping, seized one vessel and sunk another since November, according to the US Maritime Administration.
Houthi attacks have dropped in recent weeks as the rebels have been targeted by a US-led airstrike campaign in Yemen. Shipping through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden still remains low because of the threat, however.
