LEBANON: Alaa plays the horrifying video she kept on her phone that shows her moments after she was riddled with bullets, her jaw shredded, hand punctured, and chest bleeding. “Did you not see the video?” the Syrian teenager asks visitors, in defiance of its cruelty, to show how far she has come.
It has been a long road. And a missed childhood.
From Alan Kurdi lying dead face down on a Turkish shore, to a dust-covered Omran Daqneesh awaiting help in an Aleppo ambulance, images of Syrian children suffering some of the conflict’s worst horrors have become iconic. Countless others still relentlessly flood the media: children pulled from under bombed buildings, or convulsing after inhaling chemical gas or drowning after boats of fleeing families capsize in choppy seas.
Alaa is one of the many victims of Syria’s six-year civil war, which the UN children’s agency UNICEF says is getting worse for children.
UNICEF says the war has forced more than 2.3 million children, or nearly 10 percent of the total pre-war population of Syria, to seek refuge in neighboring countries. Save the Children says as of 2016, at least 3 million children are estimated to be living in areas with high exposure to explosive weapons.
UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Geert Cappelaere said every six hours a child was killed or seriously injured in Syria in 2016, calling it the worst period for children since the war began in 2011.
“Children have been facing true atrocities. The scars of six years of war upon children are multiple and are very very deep scars,” Cappelaera told The Associated Press.
Four years and 12 surgeries later, Alaa is still rebuilding her face and jaw. There is also the depression. For a long time she avoided looking in the mirror or walking past glass windows. She even avoided looking people in the eye, fearing she would catch the reflection of her maimed face.
Just days before the second anniversary of Syria’s uprising in March 2013, Alaa, at the time 15, was heading by car with her younger sister and toddler brother to their grandmother’s house in the central Homs province. She had a doctor’s appointment, and was preparing for end-of-year exams. Before their mother even stepped into the car, an hours-long gunfight broke out between Syria’s opposition and government forces. They were caught in the middle.
“I saw the person who fired at us with my own eyes. But I didn’t feel it or get it until something went straight for my mouth,” Alaa recalled.
Alaa’s full name was withheld for security concerns over relatives back home.
Her sister Hamida, now 17, was also badly wounded. Their 2-year-old brother was saved because Alaa took three bullets to the hand shielding his head and shoving him out of the car, apparently to safety. For hours, the mother tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the battle.
“No matter how hard I screamed, no one heard me because the shooting was so heavy,” said Tahani, their mother.
The girls were carried from the scene, at first presumed dead.
Alaa and her family traveled to Lebanon a month after the incident.
“For a month, I refrained from looking at myself in the mirror. Impossible. Impossible,” Alaa said, passionately, speaking at her home in the northern town where she settled with her mother, three siblings and step-father.
At first, doctors struggled to heal her wounds, shattering what little spirit she had remaining. One doctor said she would die any day, she recalled.
With her mouth and tongue stitched up, Alaa couldn’t speak for a month. She could only eat baby food. When briefly separated from her mother, she suffered anxiety fits. Seeing her killer in every approaching stranger, she was terrified of men.
To add to the family’s pain, Hamida, Alaa’s younger sister, also suffered complications from her multiple wounds. Bullets had riddled her body, puncturing her back and stomach, and costing her a kidney, half her liver and 12 centimeters of her intestine.
Hamida said she lost years of her childhood in hospitals, undergoing treatment and following strict diets. Now she aspires to be a child care worker.
“I want to return to those years and always be a child,” said Hamida.
In late 2014, a doctor and a local organization finally raised enough money for Alaa’s reconstructive surgery. After a 17-hour operation, she was once again able to look at herself in the mirror.
Last year, she stepped out of isolation, returning to school to study architecture.
But the blows kept coming. Alaa’s sweetheart back home was killed, also in the fighting.
Alaa’s repeated viewing of the incident reflects a deeper struggle with the scars of war. She keeps a small notebook in which she wrote to her mother when her tongue was stitched up. “Here I tell her, mom, I can’t sleep from the saliva. ... I am suffocating,” she read from the book, choking on her words.
Her mother refuses to revisit the notebook.
Alaa’s eyes light up when she remembers the nurse who introduced her to the doctor that raised the money for her major surgery.
Tight resources for over 1 million Syrian refugees registered in Lebanon have complicated even the simplest form of treatment.
“There are also lots of children who don’t have documents and their families are too scared to get them to Beirut to have medical assessments. That is a huge problem as well,” said Sam Gough of INARA, the organization that sponsored Alaa’s dental implants and other treatments.
Even curable diseases are a challenge to prevent among the refugee community, Gough said.
Alaa is still completing treatment to fix her dental implants. Shrapnel remains lodged in her chest. She watches a weekly plastic surgery TV program and dreams of the day the scar line framing her lips disappears.
“I want to finish my treatment. I am tired. It has been years,” she said. “The pain in my heart and what I lived through will not go away.
“In Syria, a girl grows up fast,” she said.
4 years on, scars of Syria’s war still line girl’s face
4 years on, scars of Syria’s war still line girl’s face
Hospital reports 7 killed, several wounded by Israeli strike in Gaza City
GAZA CITY: An Israeli air strike killed at least seven people and wounded several others early Wednesday in Gaza City, according to a local hospital.
The strike on an apartment in the devastated northern city killed seven members of the same family, the Al-Ahli hospital said, with eyewitnesses on Wednesday also reporting strikes elsewhere in the strip, particularly around Rafah.
Scenes from Israel and Gaza reflect dashed hopes as imminent ceasefire seems unlikely
- Israel has killed more than 34,700 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry
- Hundreds of thousands in Gaza have been displaced, many sheltering in nylon tents in Gaza’s south, as “a full-blown famine” develops in the north of the enclave, according to the United Nations
JERUSALEM: An announcement by Hamas late Monday that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal sent people in the streets of Rafah into temporary jubilation, as Palestinian evacuees in the jam-packed town felt their first glimmer of hope the war could end.
For families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, the announcement raised the possibility that their long wait was coming to an end — that they might soon see their loved ones.
But the fervor was short-lived.
A few hours after Hamas’ announcement, Israel rejected the proposal — which was different from one the two sides had been discussing for days — and said it was sending a team of negotiators for a new round of talks.
By Tuesday morning, Israeli tanks had rolled into Rafah, cementing the dashed hopes among Israelis and Palestinians of any imminent ceasefire.
In Rafah, disillusioned Palestinians spent Tuesday packing up their belongings and preparing to evacuate.
Families of Israeli hostages were incensed, too, and thousands of protesters demonstrated late into the night across the country.
GAZA: PALESTINIANS EVACUATE, CONDEMN COLLAPSE OF DEAL
Across Gaza, Palestinians have been demanding a ceasefire for months, hoping that a stop to the fighting will bring an end to the suffering.
Over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli fire and airstrikes since the war erupted on Oct. 7., according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. That day, Hamas militants killed about 1,200 in Israel and took around 250 hostages.
An estimated 100 hostages and the remains of 30 others are still held by Hamas, which insists it will not release them unless Israel ends the war and withdraws from Gaza.
Hundreds of thousands in Gaza have been displaced, many sheltering in nylon tents in Gaza’s south, as “a full-blown famine” develops in the north of the enclave, according to the United Nations.
So when the news came out that Hamas had accepted a ceasefire proposal put forward by Egypt and Qatar, Palestinians poured onto the streets, carrying children on their shoulders and banging pots and pans in excitement. For a moment, it seemed life would get easier.
But in the early hours of Tuesday, Israeli tanks entered the edge of Rafah and took control of one of the key border crossings between Israel and Gaza. Palestinians in the city loaded their belongings onto large trucks and fled.
“They kept giving us hope and telling us tomorrow, or after tomorrow, a truce will take place,” said Najwa Al-Siksik as drones buzzed over her tent camp. “As you can hear,” she said, “this was happening all night long.”
El-Sisik said she had lost all hope of an eventual deal.
“(Israel) doesn’t care about us or our children,” she said. “It only cares about its people. And (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu only cares about being at the top.”
Raef Abou Labde, who fled to Rafah from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis earlier in the war, rode atop a car packed with belongings, headed to what was sure to be yet another temporary refuge. Labde said he had little faith that Netanyahu’s far-right government sincerely wanted a ceasefire deal.
“I hope to God that the truce happens,” he said. “But what I see is that Netanyahu doesn’t want a ceasefire. He wants to displace the Palestinian people to Sinai, destroy Gaza and occupy it.”
ISRAEL: PROTESTS GROW, DEMANDING NEW DEAL NOW
In Israel, the Hamas announcement did not provoke the kind of immediate celebrations seen in Gaza. Many relatives of hostages held in Gaza, who have seen what feels like countless rounds of ceasefire negotiations end with no deal, have grown jaded.
“We won’t believe there’s a deal until we start to see some hostages return home,” said Michael Levy, whose 33-year-old brother, Or Levy, remains in captivity.
Still, the back and forth between Israel and Hamas led to boisterous and sustained protests Monday night. Protesters, led by hostage families, blocked the main highway into Tel Aviv, lighting fires on the road.
Demonstrations also broke out in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Beersheba.
Hostage families slammed the government’s inaction on a possible deal in a hearing at Israel’s parliament Tuesday.
“We see all sorts of explanations — this isn’t the deal that we gave them, Hamas changed it,” said Rotem Cooper, whose father Amiram Cooper was kidnapped Oct. 7. He questioned whether military pressure was an effective bargaining tactic to force Hamas to release additional hostages.
For some, the news indicated that a deal was closer than ever before.
Sharone Lifshitz, whose father, Oded, is a hostage, said she believed the differences between the proposal Hamas had accepted and Israel’s “core demands” were not so wide.
“Hamas are shrewd operators,” she said. “Now it’s going to be hard for Israel to just say ‘no.’”
Others said they hoped Israel’s movement into Rafah Tuesday was a tactic to pressure Hamas into a mutually agreeable deal.
“This is a way to show that Israel is serious about its demands,” said Levy. “Hamas can’t just declare they have agreed to a deal with changed terms.”
Powerful Iraqi pro-Iran group says US troops must leave
- “We also haven’t seen the necessary seriousness from the Iraqi government to remove them,” the spokesman, Abu Ali Al-Askari, added in a statement
BAGHDAD: Iraq’s powerful Kataeb Hezbollah on Tuesday renewed its call for US troops to withdraw from Iraq, months after the Iran-backed armed group suspended attacks against American forces.
Washington and Baghdad have been engaged in talks over the presence of US troops in Iraq, who are stationed there as part of an international anti-jihadist coalition.
A spokesman for Kataeb Hezbollah said in a statement that the group “did not perceive the American enemy’s seriousness in withdrawing the troops and dismantling its spy bases in Iraq.”
“We also haven’t seen the necessary seriousness from the Iraqi government to remove them,” the spokesman, Abu Ali Al-Askari, added in a statement.
The United States considers Kataeb Hezbollah a “terrorist” group and has repeatedly targeted its operations in recent strikes.
During more than three months, as regional tensions soared over the devastating Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, US troops were targeted more than 165 times in the Middle East, mainly in Iraq and neighboring Syria.
The Islamic Resistance of Iraq, a loose alliance of Iran-backed groups including Kataeb Hezbollah, had claimed the majority of the attacks.
But a deadly drone attack in late January triggered retaliation, with US forces launching dozens of strikes against Tehran-backed groups, including Kataeb Hezbollah.
Three US personnel were killed in the January 28 drone strike in Jordan, near the Syrian border.
Two days later, Kataeb Hezbollah said it was suspending its attacks on US forces.
In February the United States and Iraq resumed talks on the future of the US-led coalition’s presence in Iraq, following a request by Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia Al-Sudani who has been calling for an end to the coalition’s mission.
The United States has some 2,500 troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria as part of the international coalition against the Islamic State (IS) group.
The coalition was deployed to Iraq at the government’s request in 2014 to help combat IS, which had taken over vast swathes of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
Israel deports a dozen Malawians sent to work on farms
- Israeli farms, a valuable part of the economy, have lost thousands of laborers since the October 7 Hamas attacks triggered the Gaza war
- Israel has killed more than 34,700 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory
LILONGWE, Malawi: Malawi on Tuesday said Israel had deported 12 workers who had walked off farms and orchards, left deserted by the Gaza conflict, that they had been sent to work on.
The workers “in breach of their contracts... abandoned their lawful employment at the farms to start working at the bakery,” Malawi’s government spokesman Moses Kunkuyu said in a statement.
Since November, hundreds of Malawians have flown to Israel as part of a government labor export program aimed at finding jobs for young people and generating desperately needed foreign exchange.
Many Malawians remain without work as the country has been gripped by an economic crisis that has seen massive government spending cuts.
Israeli farms, a valuable part of the economy, have lost thousands of laborers since the October 7 Hamas attacks triggered the Gaza war.
Dozens of foreign workers were among about 240 people that Israel says were kidnapped in the attacks.
Lilongwe cautioned the remaining workers, many of them young men and women, that a breach of contract would “not be tolerated.”
Kunkuyu urged workers to “desist from such behavior as it puts this country into disrepute.”
After being processed, four of the 12 workers arrived back in the southern African country on Tuesday while the other eight would arrive on Wednesday, the state said.
The labor deal has been criticized by rights group and Malawi’s opposition.
In November, the country’s opposition leader Kondwani Nankhumwa as “an evil transaction” because of the threat from the war that has left tens of thousands dead.
“The two governments will ensure the labor export to Israel operates within the prevailing regulatory frameworks,” the Malawian government said.
Two weeks ago, Malawi opened an embassy in Tel Aviv, which its foreign minister Nancy Tembo said reaffirmed the government’s commitment to “long-standing” bilateral relations between the two nations.
She said the labor deal would provide 3,000 workers initially.
US completes construction of Gaza aid pier
WASHINGTON: The US military has completed construction of its Gaza aid pier, but weather conditions mean it is currently unsafe to move the two-part facility into place, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
The pier — which the US military started building last month and which will cost at least $320 million — is aimed at boosting deliveries of desperately needed humanitarian assistance to Gaza, which has been ravaged by seven months of Israeli operations against Hamas.
“As of today, the construction of the two portions of the JLOTS — the floating pier and the Trident pier — are complete and awaiting final movement offshore,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told journalists, using an acronym for Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, the official name for the pier capability.
“Today there are still forecasted high winds and high sea swells, which are causing unsafe conditions for the JLOTS components to be moved. So the pier sections and military vessels involved in its construction are still positioned at the port of Ashdod,” in Israel, Singh said.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) “stands by to move the pier into position in the near future,” she added.
The vessels and the under-construction pier were moved to the port due to bad weather last week. Once the weather clears, the pier will be anchored to the Gaza shore by Israeli soldiers, keeping US troops off the ground.
Aid will then be transported via commercial vessels to a floating platform off the Gaza coast, where it will be transferred to smaller vessels, brought to the pier, and taken to land by truck for distribution.
Plans for the pier were first announced by US President Joe Biden in early March as Israel held up deliveries of assistance by ground, and US Army troops and vessels soon set out on a lengthy trip to the Mediterranean to build the pier.
Some two months later, the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire. The United Nations said Tuesday that Israel had denied it access to the Rafah crossing — the key entry point for aid into the besieged territory.
The White House said the closing of Rafah and the other main crossing, Karem Shalom, was “unacceptable” and needed to be reversed.
In addition to seeking to establish a maritime corridor for aid shipments, the United States has also been delivering assistance via the air.
CENTCOM said American C-130 cargo planes dropped more than 25,000 Meal Ready To Eat military rations into Gaza on Tuesday in a joint operation that also delivered the equivalent of more than 13,000 meals of Jordanian food supplies.
“To date the US has dropped 1,200 tons of humanitarian assistance,” CENTCOM said in a statement.
Gaza’s bloodiest-ever war broke out following Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,789 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
