CAIRO: Nothing says “Egypt” like the Great Pyramids of Giza. The monumental structures are the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the World, and are the only remaining wonder of the ancient world.
Visiting them ought to be a magical experience. In practice, it is anything but. It involves fending off aggressive vendors and scammers, and wading through litter.
With tourism improving for the first time since the 2011 revolution, Egypt has decided it must improve conditions around one of its main attractions and biggest money spinners.
A development project costing 400 million Egyptian pounds ($23 million) to modernize the infrastructure around the pyramids includes plans for a fleet of electric cars transporting visitors from the entrance of the archaeological complex to the pyramids every five minutes.
The planned transformation also involves closing off the Mena House entrance to the site, restricting entry to the Fayoum entrance, and connecting the pyramids to the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is scheduled to open later this year.
Mohammed Ismail, general supervisor for the development project, told Al-Masry Al-Yom newspaper that the electric vehicles will be driven on UNESCO-approved “yellow concrete suitable for the area.”
The current pyramid “experience” involves passing through a heavy security checkpoint, only to face a barrage of hawkers and conmen using the hardest of hard-sell techniques for overpriced souvenirs, tickets and camel rides.
Jumping in front of vehicles and jostling tourists on foot, they loudly insist they are the sole purveyors of entrance tickets, and the only way to the pyramids is by horse — their horse.
Signs state that rides should cost no more than 5 pounds, but the scammers often demand hundreds.
“I was taking photos, and a man appeared out of nowhere and shoved a scarf into my bag,” said Mike, a 30-year-old tourist from England.
“I tried to give it back to him, but he claimed I’d already taken it and had to pay for it. The police just watched, and I only managed to get away by forcing the scarf back into his hand and rushing off. He actually looked offended!”
Another tourist said: “We drove past some very heavy security, and all of a sudden our car gets charged by three men shouting at us and banging on the car. They pointed at us to pull over to the side, but our driver managed to get past them and speed off. It was quite scary really.”
Even after fending off the scammers outside the complex, there is little chance of visitors enjoying the pyramids in relative peace because there are more vendors inside.
Police officers, who are supposed to safeguard the complex and provide a reassuring presence for tourists, stand idly by.
One Egyptian who helped two tourists escape from persistent hawkers was attacked by one of them for “stealing away customers.” When he complained to the police, they accused him of soliciting tourists without a license.
The sight that greets visitors is nothing like the typical travel brochure vista of the pyramids rising majestically from vast expanses of pristine desert.
Instead, approaching the venerable ancient monuments means wading through a sea of modern detritus: Cigarette packets, drinks and snack wrappers. No wonder Ismail describes it as an “open zoo.”
Tourist numbers in 2017 were 55 percent up on the previous year, and hopes are high that they will be even better this year.
On Feb. 20, flights from Russia are set to resume for the first time since the downing in October 2015 of a Russian carrier that was flying passengers from Sharm El-Sheikh on the Red Sea to St. Petersburg.
The 400-million-pound redevelopment budget does not include funding for the electric car shuttles. “We are looking for a financier,” said Ismail.
But the fate of nuisance vendors and camel-ride scammers is sealed. They will be moved to an entirely separate area dedicated to horse-riding.
Pyramids clean-up plans to send scammers packing
Pyramids clean-up plans to send scammers packing
Hamas ‘only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire’: Blinken
- ‘We wait to see whether, in effect, they can take yes for an answer on the ceasefire and release of hostages’
- But official says US cannot support a major military operation going into Rafah
“We wait to see whether, in effect, they can take yes for an answer on the ceasefire and release of hostages,” Blinken said late Friday.
“The reality in this moment is the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire is Hamas.”
Blinken pointed to difficulties in negotiating with Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist group and does not engage with directly and which Israel has vowed to eliminate.
“The leaders of Hamas that we’re indirectly engaged with — through the Qataris, through the Egyptians — are, of course, living outside of Gaza,” Blinken said.
“The ultimate decision-makers are the folks who are actually in Gaza itself with whom none of us have direct contact.”
Blinken was addressing a dinner at the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum in Arizona two days after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top leaders on his latest visit to the Middle East.
Ahead of his talks with Blinken, Netanyahu vowed to push ahead with an assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah to root out Hamas regardless of the outcome of negotiations for a temporary ceasefire that would involve the release of hostages.
President Joe Biden’s administration has repeatedly warned Netanyahu’s government against moving on Rafah, where some 1.4 million Palestinians have taken shelter after fleeing the Israeli assault in response to the October 7 attack by Hamas.
Blinken said that Israel, which counts on the United States for military and diplomatic support, has yet to present “a credible plan to genuinely protect the civilians who are in harm’s way” in Rafah.
“Absent such a plan, we can’t support a major military operation going into Rafah because the damage it would do is beyond what’s acceptable,” Blinken said.
France condemns attack on Red Cross in Sudan
PARIS: France on Friday condemned “in the strongest terms” an attack on an International Committee of the Red Cross convoy in war-torn Sudan that killed two staff and injured three others.
“France calls on all parties to the conflict to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law, which obliges them to protect humanitarian and health staff and guarantee complete, safe and unhindered humanitarian access,” said French foreign ministry spokesman Christophe Lemoine.
The ICRC said gunmen killed two drivers and injured three staff in South Darfur on Thursday as they returned from a humanitarian mission.
A brutal conflict between the Sudanese army led by General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces of his ex-deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has torn the country apart for more than a year.
The war has killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions more to flee their homes in what the United Nations has called the “largest displacement crisis in the world.”
It has also triggered acute food shortages and a humanitarian crisis that has left the northeast African country’s people at risk of starvation.
UN official warns that famine in northern Gaza is already ‘full-blown’
- Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry
- The panel that serves as the internationally recognized monitor for food crises said earlier this year that northern Gaza was on the brink of famine and likely to experience it this month
WASHINGTON: A top UN official said Friday that hard-hit northern Gaza was now in “full-blown famine” after more than six months of war between Israel and Hamas and severe Israeli restrictions on food deliveries to the Palestinian territory.
Cindy McCain, the American director of the UN World Food Program, became the most prominent international official so far to declare that trapped civilians in the most cut-off part of Gaza had gone over the brink into famine.
“It’s horror,” McCain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview to air Sunday. “There is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it’s moving its way south.”
She said a ceasefire and a greatly increased flow of aid through land and sea routes was essential to confronting the growing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, home to 2.3 million people.
There was no immediate comment from Israel, which controls entrance into Gaza and says it is beginning to allow in more food and other humanitarian aid through land crossings.
The panel that serves as the internationally recognized monitor for food crises said earlier this year that northern Gaza was on the brink of famine and likely to experience it this month. The next update will not come before this summer.
One of the US Agency for International Development’s humanitarian officials in Gaza told The Associated Press that on-the-ground preparations for a new US-led sea route were on track to bring in more food — including treatment for hundreds of thousands of starving children — by early or mid-May. That’s when the American military expects to finish building a floating pier to receive the shipments.
Ramping up the delivery of aid on the planned US-backed sea route will be gradual as aid groups test the distribution and security arrangements for relief workers, the USAID official said.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity over security concerns for work done in a conflict zone. They were some of the agency’s first comments on the status of preparations for the Biden administration’s $320 million Gaza pier project, for which USAID is helping coordinate on-the-ground security and distribution.
At a factory in rural Georgia on Friday, USAID Administrator Samantha Power pointed to the food crises in Gaza and other parts of the world as she announced a $200 million investment aimed at increasing production of emergency nutritional paste for starving children under 5.
Power spoke to factory workers, peanut farmers and local dignitaries sitting among pallets of the paste at the Mana nonprofit in Fitzgerald. It is one of two factories in the US that produces the nutritional food, which is used in clinical settings and made from ground peanuts, powdered milk, sugar and oil, ready to eat in plastic pouches resembling large ketchup packets.
“This effort, this vision meets the moment,” Power said. “And it could not be more timely, more necessary or more important.”
Under pressure from the US and others, Israeli officials in recent weeks have begun slowly reopening some border crossings for relief shipments.
But aid coming through the sea route, once it’s operational, still will serve only a fraction — half a million people — of those who need help in Gaza. Aid organizations including USAID stress that getting more aid through border crossings is essential to staving off famine.
Children under 5 are among the first to die when wars, droughts or other disasters curtail food. Hospital officials in northern Gaza reported the first deaths from hunger in early March and said most of the dead were children.
Power said the UN has called for 400 metric tons of the nutritional paste “in light of the severe hunger that is pervading across Gaza right now, and the severe, acute humanitarian crisis.” USAID expects to provide a quarter of that, she said.
Globally, she said at the Georgia factory, the treatment made there “will save untold lives, millions of lives.”
USAID is coordinating with the World Food Program and other humanitarian partners and governments on security and distribution for the pier project, while US military forces finish building it. President Joe Biden, under pressure to do more to ease the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza as the US provides military support for Israel, announced the project in early March.
US Central Command said in a statement Friday that offshore assembly of the floating pier has been temporarily paused due to high winds and sea swells, which caused unsafe conditions for soldiers. The partially built pier and the military vessels involved have gone to Israel’s Port of Ashdod, where the work will continue.
A US official said the high seas will delay the installation for several days, possibly until later next week. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operation details, said the pause could last longer if the bad weather continues because military personnel and divers have to get into the water for the final installation.
The struggles this week with the first aid delivery through a newly reopened land corridor into north Gaza underscored the uncertainty about security and the danger still facing relief workers. Israeli settlers blocked the convoy before it crossed Wednesday. Once inside Gaza, the convoy was commandeered by Hamas militants, before UN officials reclaimed it.
In Gaza, the nutritional treatment for starving children is most urgently needed in the northern part of the Palestinian territory. Civilians have been cut off from most aid supplies, bombarded by Israeli airstrikes and driven into hiding by fighting.
Acute malnutrition rates there among children under 5 have surged from 1 percent before the war to 30 percent five months later, the USAID official said. The official called it the fastest such climb in hunger in recent history, more than in grave conflicts and food shortages in Somalia or South Sudan.
One of the few medical facilities still operating in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan hospital, is besieged by parents bringing in thousands of children with malnutrition for treatment, the official said. Aid officials believe many more starving children remain unseen and in need, with families unable to bring them through fighting and checkpoints for care.
Saving the gravely malnourished children in particular requires both greatly increased deliveries of aid and sustained calm in fighting, the official said, so that aid workers can set up treatment facilities around the territory and families can safely bring children in for the sustained treatment needed.
Hamas says Israeli PM trying to derail Gaza truce deal
- Israel has killed more than 34,622 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry
GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: A top Hamas official accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday of trying to derail a proposed Gaza truce and hostage release deal with his threats to keep fighting the Palestinian militant group.
“Netanyahu was the obstructionist of all previous rounds of dialogue... and it is clear that he still is,” senior Hamas official Hossam Badran told AFP by telephone.
Foreign mediators have waited for a Hamas response to a proposal to halt the fighting for 40 days and exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners, which its chief Ismail Haniyeh has said the group was considering in a “positive spirit.”
A major stumbling block has been that, while Hamas has demanded a lasting ceasefire, Netanyahu has vowed to crush its remaining fighters in the far-southern city of Rafah, which is packed with displaced civilians.
The hawkish prime minister has insisted he will send ground troops into Rafah, despite strong concerns voiced by UN agencies and ally Washington for the safety of the 1.2 million civilians inside the city.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency was “deeply concerned that a full-scale military operation in Rafah... could lead to a bloodbath.”
“The broken health system would not be able to cope with a surge in casualties and deaths that a Rafah incursion would cause,” an agency statement said.
Badran charged that Netanyahu’s insistence on attacking Rafah was calculated to “thwart any possibility of concluding an agreement” in the negotiations brokered by Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators.
Israeli air strikes killed several more people in Rafah overnight, Palestinian medics and the civil defense agency said.
One bereaved resident, Sanaa Zoorob, said her sister and six of her nieces and nephews were killed.
Two of the children “were found in pieces in their mother’s embrace,” Zoorob said, appealing for “a permanent ceasefire and a full withdrawal from Gaza.”
The war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
The militants also took some 250 hostages, of whom Israel estimates 128 remain in Gaza.
The army says 35 of them are dead, including 49-year-old Dror Or, a resident of the badly hit kibbutz Beeri, whose death was confirmed by authorities on Friday.
Israel’s devastating retaliatory campaign has killed at least 34,622 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Israel has weathered an international backlash over the spiralling death toll.
Pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked US campuses for weeks were more muted Friday after a series of clashes with police, mass arrests and a stern White House directive to restore order.
But similar demonstrations have spread to campuses in Britain, France, Mexico, Australia and elsewhere.
Turkiye announced on Thursday that it was suspending all trade with Israel, valued by the government at $9.5 billion a year.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the move was intended to “force Israel to agree to a ceasefire and increase the amount of humanitarian aid to enter” Gaza.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who have carried out months of attacks on merchant shipping in the Red Sea in a costly blow to maritime trade, said they would extend their attacks on Israel-bound shipping to the Mediterranean “immediately.”
Israel’s siege has pushed many of Gaza’s 2.4 million people to the brink of famine.
US pressure has prompted Israel to facilitate more aid deliveries to Gaza, including through the reopened Erez crossing that leads directly into the hardest-hit north.
Food availability has improved “a little bit,” said the World Health Organization’s representative in the Palestinian territories, Rik Peeperkorn.
But he warned that the threat of famine had “absolutely not” gone away.
Five Israeli human rights groups that took Israel to court over restrictions on aid to war-torn Gaza said the state’s insistence that it has met its obligations was “incomprehensible.”
The government had told the supreme court that the steps it had taken went “above and beyond” its obligations under international law.
Gisha and four other Israeli non-profit organizations retorted that the shortages evident inside Gaza indicated “the respondents are not meeting their obligations, not to the required extent nor at the necessary speed.”
The US-based charity World Central Kitchen resumed operations this week, after suspending them in the aftermath of Israeli drone strikes that killed seven of its staff as they unloaded aid in Gaza on April 1.
The group’s kitchen manager Zakria Yahya Abukuwaik said: “We realized after the kitchen closed that many mouths were left hungry.”
World Central Kitchen was involved in an effort earlier this year to establish a new maritime aid corridor to Gaza from Cyprus to help compensate for dwindling deliveries by land from Israel.
The project suffered a new blow Friday when the US military announced high winds had forced troops working to assemble a temporary aid pier off the Gaza coast to relocate to the Israeli port of Ashdod.
“The partially built pier and military vessels involved in its construction have moved to the Port of Ashdod, where assembly will continue, and will be completed prior to the emplacement of the pier in its intended location when sea states subside,” US Central Command said in a statement.
Several Arab and Western governments have also airdropped aid into northern Gaza. Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Basal said one person was killed and several injured when they were hit by falling pallets.
$1.07bn EU ‘bribe’ over Syrian refugees stirs anger in Lebanon
BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Friday vowed to step up deportations as part of a crackdown on illegal residents in the country.
“This matter is not up for debate, and orders have been given to the relevant authorities to implement what is necessary,” he said.
Mikati’s comments came after the EU on Thursday announced a €1 billion ($1.07 billion) aid package for Lebanon, mostly to boost border control in a bid to curb refugee flows across the Mediterranean Sea to Cyprus and Italy.
Lebanon hosts more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees.
In a television interview, Mikati said: “Any Syrian residing in Lebanon illegally will be deported, and a different approach will be taken toward all registered individuals compared to unregistered ones.”
While Mikati welcomed the announcement of increased European aid, some political and religious figures described the package as a “bribe” to resettle Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and warned that Lebanon is “not for sale.”
Local newspaper headlines highlighted the objections, which follow increasing numbers of murders, thefts, and kidnappings in recent months carried out by Syrians who entered Lebanon illegally.
Syrian inmates now make up 35 percent of Lebanon’s prison population, according to Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi.
Cyprus recently complained about the increasing number of boats arriving on its shores carrying Syrians who traveled via Lebanon. Dozens remain stranded on the island, which refuses to accept them as refugees, and wants to return them to Lebanon.
Mikati said that there is “a European division” on the issue of safe areas in Syria for the return of refugees.
“We will undertake a campaign in this context to push the EU to take a decision that there are safe areas in Syria,” he added.
The announcement of the EU package was made as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Lebanon on Thursday with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides.
However, Nicolas Sehnaoui, a member of the Strong Lebanon parliamentary bloc, said: “Keep the billion euros, and take an additional billion in exchange for taking all the Syrian refugees to European countries.”
Razi Al-Hajj, a member of the Strong Republic bloc, described the presence of Syrian refugees in the country as a “ticking time bomb.”
He said: “If Mikati wants to dispel the doubts of the Lebanese about the EU’s agenda in Lebanon, and the government’s true intention, he must begin implementing what he promised, which (means) deporting anyone residing illegally on Lebanese territory.”
Change party MP Waddah Sadek said: “Those who are residing illegally in Lebanon — the number of whom is significant — should be deported. An appropriate solution should then be reached regarding those who sought refuge in Lebanon for fear of getting killed or persecuted.”
Jaafari Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Kabalan said in his Friday sermon: “We don’t want to slaughter Lebanon with 1 billion poisoned euros.
“Europe is Washington’s partner in the devastation in Syria and the siege on Lebanon. I warn those in charge against assuming the role of Europe’s security and political guard. The Syrian refugees’ case requires an urgent resolution. We ran out of time, and our country’s demography, stability, security, economy and livelihood are threatened.”
Maroun Al-Khawli from the National Campaign for the Return of Syrian Refugees, said: “Lebanon will not be for sale under any circumstances.”
He said the aid package “is a humiliating deal for Lebanon’s dignity and sovereignty, and a dark spot in the history of the caretaker government.”
Shiite cleric Ali Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah said in his Friday sermon: “The European Union resorts to the financial aspect to persuade the Lebanese when it comes to the Syrian refugees’ file.
“However, this matter is not limited to the financial dimension. It requires us to address its root causes and organize the Syrian presence in a way that doesn’t cause any internal repercussions, concerns and tensions that might affect the relationship between Lebanese and Syrian refugees.”
In a statement, the Progress Party said: “The European countries’ policy ensures that the Syrian refugees’ boats don’t reach their shores. This is what made them offer Lebanon €1 billion to make up for their presence in the country.
“The governing system accepted the bribe to recycle itself at the expense of the accumulating crises without organizing this file.”
The party proposed setting up camps for Syrian refugees on the border, and securing their needs through international support.
