BEIRUT: Daesh militants have killed 12 Syrian regime fighters in an ambush as the group faces separate assaults on its last desert strongholds, a war monitor said Tuesday.
The attack late Monday in Syria’s southern province of Sweida came as US-backed forces advanced against the militants on the border with Iraq, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
It also comes with President Bashar Assad’s forces poised to launch an attack on the northwestern province of Idlib, the last major region in Syria still controlled by rebels and extremists.
The Daesh ambush in Sweida’s volcanic plateau of Tulul Al-Safa sparked fighting that killed eight militants, the Britain-based Observatory said.
State news agency SANA reported heavy clashes with Daesh in the area, which lies some 100 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Damascus, adding that government aircraft and artillery “targeted hideouts and positions” held by the group.
Government forces have been fighting Daesh in Sweida since militants carried out a wave of attacks in the mainly Druze province on July 25, killing 250 people according to the Observatory.
During their rampage, which targeted the provincial capital as well as rural areas, the militants also seized around 30 hostages, mostly women and their children.
At least 27 are believed to still be held, according to Human Rights Watch, after Daesh said it had beheaded a 19-year-old man and announced an elderly woman had died.
Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said the hostages were believed to be held captive in the Tulul Al-Safa area.
A source in Sweida told AFP that families had had no word of their kidnapped relatives in weeks.
Daesh has lost nearly all of the great swathes of territory straddling Iraq and Syria which it seized in 2014, but retains a presence in the vast Badiya desert that lies between Damascus and the Iraqi border, and holds a pocket in the Euphrates Valley in the east.
In that eastern pocket, a US-backed Kurdish-Arab alliance has for months been closing in on the town of Hajjin east of the Euphrates River near the Iraqi border, and on Monday launched an assault to retake it.
In the early hours of Tuesday, the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance advanced inside the town, the Observatory said, with backing from the US-led coalition fighting Daesh.
“They have seized control of the northwestern part of Hajjin” after residents fled, the monitor’s chief Abdel Rahman said.
An SDF commander said the offensive on Hajjin aimed to oust an estimated 3,000 militants, including a large portion of foreign fighters, from the town and surrounding areas.
“Most of the frontline commanders in this pocket are Iraqi,” said Ahmad Abu Khawla, a commander with the Deir Ezzor Military Council, which is part of the SDF.
After humanitarian corridors were opened to allow residents to flee the Daesh-held area, most civilians remaining inside were “directly linked to the group — hostages or the families of Islamic State fighters,” he said, referring to Daesh.
Abu Khawla said Daesh had “secret jails where they hold civilians” captured in other areas of Syria.
Last year Daesh lost its de facto Syrian capital of Raqqa in the north of the country, and this spring militants bussed out of the southern suburbs of Damascus.
Since Monday, 27 militants and 10 SDF fighters have been killed in the fighting for the Hajjin pocket, the Observatory says.
More than 350,000 people have been killed and millions more displaced since Syria’s war started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
Daesh ambush kills 21 regime fighters in southern Syria
Daesh ambush kills 21 regime fighters in southern Syria
- The attack occurred late Monday in the rural Tulul Al-Safa area of the province
- Daesh has killed 21 regime fighters in Syria’s southern province of Sweida
Palestinian Authority announces a new Cabinet as it faces calls for reform
President Mahmoud Abbas, who has led the PA for nearly two decades and remains in overall control, announced the new government in a presidential decree on Thursday. None of the incoming ministers is a well-known figure.
Abbas tapped Mohammad Mustafa, a longtime adviser, to be prime minister earlier this month. Mustafa, a politically independent US-educated economist, had vowed to form a technocratic government and create an independent trust fund to help rebuild Gaza. Mustafa will also serve as foreign minister.
Interior Minister Ziad Hab Al-Rih is a member of Abbas’ secular Fatah movement and held the same portfolio in the previous government. The Interior Ministry oversees the security forces. The incoming minister for Jerusalem affairs, Ashraf Al-Awar, registered to run as a Fatah candidate in elections in 2021 that were indefinitely delayed.
At least five of the incoming 23 ministers are from Gaza, but it was not immediately clear if they are still in the territory.
The PA administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Its forces were driven from Gaza when Hamas seized power in 2007, and it has no power there.
It has little popular support or legitimacy among Palestinians, in part because it has not held elections in 18 years. Its policy of cooperating with Israel on security matters is extremely unpopular and has led many Palestinians to view it as a subcontractor of the occupation.
Opinion polls in recent years have consistently found that a vast majority of Palestinians want the 88-year-old Abbas to resign.
The United States has called for a revitalized PA to administer postwar Gaza ahead of eventual statehood.
Israel has rejected that idea, saying it will maintain open-ended security control over Gaza and partner with Palestinians who are not affiliated with the PA or Hamas. It’s unclear who in Gaza would be willing to take on such a role.
Hamas has rejected the formation of the new government as illegitimate, calling instead for all Palestinian factions, including Fatah, to form a power-sharing government ahead of national elections.
It has warned Palestinians in Gaza against cooperating with Israel to administer the territory, saying anyone who does will be treated as a collaborator, which is understood as a death threat.
Jamaa Islamiya, Lebanese militants allied to Hamas
- Several groups allied to Hamas have exchanged near-daily fire with Israeli forces along Lebanon’s southern border
- The groups say they are acting in solidarity with Hamas and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
BEIRUT: Jamaa Islamiya has a much lower profile than other militant groups in Lebanon, but the escalation of strikes over the border with Israel is pushing it into the spotlight.
Formed in the 1960s, Jamaa Islamiya claims to have carried out operations with Palestinian militant group Hamas in southern Lebanon and said seven affiliated rescuers were killed in an overnight Israeli strike.
Several groups allied to Hamas have exchanged near-daily fire with Israeli forces along Lebanon’s southern border since war erupted in the Gaza Strip following Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel.
The groups say they are acting in solidarity with Hamas and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Jamaa Islamiya has carried out “joint operations with Hamas” in Lebanon, according to an official from the small Sunni Muslim movement who requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media.
“All forces that operate in south Lebanon coordinate their actions,” Ali Abu Yassin, head of Jamaa Islamiya’s political bureau, told AFP.
As the group announced the death of the seven medics on Wednesday, the Israeli military said those killed were Jamaa Islamiya “terrorists.”
Mohanad Hage Ali, from the Carnegie Middle East Center, said Jamaa Islamiya was “operating as an extension of Hamas in Lebanon,” describing the two movements’ relationship as “organic.”
Over the weekend, a Jamaa Islamiya official reportedly survived an Israeli drone strike in eastern Lebanon and earlier this month the group said three of its fighters were killed in Lebanon’s south.
The official requesting anonymity said two Jamaa Islamiya members were serving as bodyguards to Hamas deputy leader Saleh Al-Aruri and were killed along with him in a January 2 strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Hage Ali said Jamaa Islamiya had “around 500 armed men” but played only a “marginal political role” in Lebanon with just one lawmaker in the national parliament.
Jamaa Islamiya and Hamas both come from the same ideological school as the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist group with origins in Egypt, the official requesting anonymity said.
Jamaa Islamiya established its armed wing, the Fajr Forces, in 1982 to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
The official said the group stayed out of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.
Relations with Hezbollah have seen ups and downs but improved recently, analyst Hage Ali said, particularly since Jamaa Islamiya elected a new leadership closer to Hamas in 2022.
But Hage Ali noted Jamaa Islamiya “is not subservient” to Hezbollah.
The two groups differ in particular over the Syrian conflict, with Hezbollah supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad since his 2011 repression of anti-government protests sparked war, unlike Hamas and Jamaa Islamiya.
Jamaa Islamiya political official Abu Yassin acknowledged his group had “differences of opinion with Hezbollah due to its participation in the Syrian war on the side of the regime.”
The Jamaa Islamiya official requesting anonymity said that though the groups differ over Syria, “today, we are in the same trench as Hezbollah on the Palestinian issue.”
Palestinian fighters battle Israeli forces around Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital
- Israeli army continues to operate around the hospital complex in Gaza City after storming it more than a week ago
CAIRO: Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters battled in close combat around Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital on Thursday, where the armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they attacked Israeli soldiers and tanks with rockets and mortar fire
The Israeli army said it continued to operate around the hospital complex in Gaza City after storming it more than a week ago. Its forces had killed around 200 gunmen since the start of the operation “while preventing harm to civilians, patients, medical teams, and medical equipment,” it said.
Gaza’s health ministry said wounded people and patients were being held inside an administration building in Al-Shifa that was not equipped to provide them with health care. Five patients had died since the Israeli raid began due to shortages of food, water and medical care, the Hamas-run ministry said.
Al-Shifa, the Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital before the war, had been one of the few health care facilities even partially operational in north Gaza before the latest fighting. It had also been housing displaced civilians.
Unverified footage on social media showed its surgery unit blackened by flames and nearby apartments on fire or destroyed.
The armed wings of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad militant groups said in a statement they “bombed, with a barrage of mortar shells, gatherings of Israeli soldiers in the vicinity of the Al-Shifa Complex” in a joint operation.
Islamic Jihad targeted an Israeli tank with an anti-tank rocket outside the hospital, it said in another statement. The Israeli military said militants fired at its troops from inside and outside the ER building.
Israel says it is targeting Hamas militants who use civilian buildings, including apartment blocks and hospitals, for cover. Hamas denies doing so.
At least 32,552 Palestinians have been killed and 74,980 wounded in Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, the territory’s health ministry said on Thursday.
Thousands more dead are believed to be buried under rubble and over 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is displaced, many at risk of famine.
The war erupted after Hamas militants broke through the border and rampaged through communities in southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 253 hostages according to Israeli tallies.
TWO MORE HOSPITALS BESIEGED
Israeli forces continued to blockade Al-Amal and Nasser hospitals in Khan Younis, while several other areas in the southern Gaza city came under Israeli fire, residents said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said seven people working for the organization arrested in a raid on Al-Amal hospital on Feb. 9 had been released after 47 days in Israeli prisons.
Among them was the director of ambulance and emergency services in the Gaza Strip, Mohammed Abu Musabeh. Eight members of the association were still being detained, it said in a statement.
Israel said soldiers from its Commando Brigade had arrested dozens of Palestinian militants in the Al-Amal area and discovered explosives and dozens of Kalashnikov-type weapons.
The World Health Organization said Al-Amal Hospital had ceased to function due to fighting, leaving just 10 of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip partially operational.
“Once more, WHO demands an immediate end to attacks on hospitals in Gaza, and calls for protection of health staff, patients, and civilians,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X on Thursday.
In Rafah, where over a million people have been sheltering, health officials said an Israeli airstrike on a house killed eight people and wounded others.
Israel says it plans a ground offensive into Rafah, where it believes most Hamas fighters are now sheltering. Its closest ally and main arms supplier the United States opposes such an assault, arguing it would cause too much harm to civilians who have sought refuge there.
Israel government shaken by ultra-Orthodox conscription row
- Military service is obligatory for all young Israelis – 32 months for men, and two years for women
- But almost all the ultra-Orthodox have been able to escape it
JERUSALEM: A legal row over controversial exemptions from compulsory military service for Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews had the country’s right-wing coalition government scurrying to find a compromise Thursday.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara sent shock waves through the government — which is reliant on ultra-Orthodox parties — declaring Wednesday there was no legal framework to the continuing exemptions.
This means that ultra-Orthodox will be liable to be called up from April 1, as Israel’s war against Hamas militants rages in the Gaza Strip.
The government has set itself a Thursday deadline to strike a deal.
With the war in Gaza, pressure has increased on the country’s large and growing ultra-orthodox community who have long been spared military service which is compulsory for everyone else.
After several legal challenges to the exemptions, the Supreme Court gave the government until Wednesday to draw up a new conscription bill.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been unable to get agreement on the deeply divisive issue, with his ultra-Orthodox allies fiercely opposed to conscription for their community.
The government has asked for a short extension to the Supreme Court deadline in the hope of formulating a deal.
The coalition depends on two large ultra-Orthodox parties.
Last year the government voted through unprecedented funding equivalent to just over $1 billion for orthodox religious schools, or yeshivas.
Netanyahu is working, at any cost, on “avoiding an early election” that would benefit Benny Gantz, a centrist member of his war cabinet, Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute think tank, has said.
Recent polls suggest that if there were an election, Gantz’s party would win the largest number of seats.
Before the war in Gaza, the religious parties had also supported Netanyahu’s controversial judicial reforms, in the hopes of further extending military exemptions.
The judicial revamp sparked months of protests, often by tens of thousands of Israelis.
But Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in February announced a reform of military service that would include the ultra-Orthodox. Some Israeli media perceived Gallant’s move as a challenge to Netanyahu. Both men belong to the same Likud party.
Military service is obligatory for all young Israelis — 32 months for men, and two years for women.
But almost all the ultra-Orthodox have been able to escape it, with 66,000 members of the community excused from military service last year alone.
Jewish men who study the Torah full-time in religious schools have long been granted an annual deferment from military service until the age of 26, at which point they become exempt.
Young ultra-Orthodox women are automatically exempt.
The exemptions date from Israel’s founding in 1948, and were meant to allow a group of 400 young people to study sacred texts and preserve Jewish traditions, much of which had been lost during the Holocaust.
But today’s ultra-Orthodox number 1.3 million people, according to the Israel Democracy Institute — bolstered by a fertility rate of more than six children per woman, compared with the national average of 2.5.
Most ultra-Orthodox want the exemptions to be extended to all religious students, saying serving in the military is incompatible with their values.
US says it downed four Yemen rebel drones in Red Sea
- US military says the unmanned aerial systems presented threat to merchant vessels
- It says the action was taken to protect freedom of navigation in international waters
WASHINGTON: The United States military said Wednesday it had downed four drones launched by Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen aimed at a US warship in the Red Sea.
US Central Command said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter, that its forces had “engaged and destroyed four long-range unmanned aerial systems” at around 2 am Sanaa time (2300 GMT), adding there were no injuries or damage reported to US or coalition ships.
“It was determined these weapons presented an imminent threat to merchant vessels and US Navy ships in the region,” the statement said.
“These actions are taken to protect freedom of navigation and make international waters safer and more secure for US Navy and merchant vessels,” it added.
In November, the Houthis launched a campaign of drone and missile strikes against vessels in the Red Sea, an area vital for world trade, in professed solidarity with Palestinians during Israel’s war against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.
US and British forces have responded with strikes against the Houthis, who have since declared American and British interests to be legitimate targets as well.