CAIRO: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi said on Saturday that the newly announced Decent Life Initiative for rural development would be an “unprecedented achievement” for Egypt.
During an inspection of road developments within the Together We Build the Future initiative, El-Sisi said that “citizens must see the amount of work that will be done” to develop the Egyptian countryside under the new project.
He added: “I dream that what is being accomplished pleases our Lord and then pleases us. The lives of people in the villages must be changed, and there must be cooperation from the people in the villages so that they help in the final output.”
El-Sisi said that there will be a competition for the best center, governorate and village within the initiative, adding that the rewards will be “big and meaningful.”
The Decent Life Initiative is working to develop about 4,600 Egyptian villages by building 175 administrative centers in 20 governorates.
The most impoverished villages were targeted for funding according to data and surveys by the Central Agency for Mobilization and Statistics, in coordination with government ministries and other authorities.
So far, the initiative has succeeded in reducing poverty rates and providing critical services to targeted villages.
El-Sisi: Decent Life Initiative ‘unprecedented achievement for Egypt’
https://arab.news/vzbh7
El-Sisi: Decent Life Initiative ‘unprecedented achievement for Egypt’
- El-Sisi said that there will be a competition for the best center, governorate and village within the initiative
- The Decent Life Initiative is working to develop about 4,600 Egyptian villages by building 175 administrative centers in 20 governorates
Gaza death toll far higher than initially reported: Lancet study
- Israel killed 25,000 more people by start of 2025 than was reported by authorities
- ‘It will be a long time before we get to a full accounting of all the people killed in Gaza, if we ever get there’
LONDON: The war in Gaza saw 25,000 more deaths in its first 16 months than authorities announced at the time, according to the Lancet.
Research published by the medical journal estimated that 75,000 deaths occurred between Oct. 7, 2023, and Jan. 5, 2025, including 42,200 women, children and elderly people.
The authors of the study published on Wednesday said: “The combined evidence suggests that, as of 5 January 2025, 3-4% of the population of the Gaza Strip had been killed violently and there have been a substantial number of non-violent deaths caused indirectly by the conflict.”
Last month, an Israeli security officer told Israeli media that casualty figures published by Gaza’s health authorities were largely accurate, having previously downplayed or questioned their size, adding that around 70,000 people were thought to have been killed in Israeli assaults since Oct. 7, 2023.
Gaza’s health authorities say 71,660 people are confirmed to have died, including 570 since the singing of a ceasefire last October.
The new research suggests that those figures are below the reality. Using trained Palestinians on the ground in the enclave, it surveyed 2,000 Gazan families who were asked to provide details about members killed in the conflict.
One of the report’s authors, Prof. Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway, University of London, said the research found that 8,200 people also died in the surveyed period from “indirect” causes such as disease and hunger.
Despite covering the most intense period of the conflict, the study does not analyze anything beyond January 2025. In August, famine was declared in Gaza by UN-backed experts.
In November, a study conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research suggested that 78,318 people had been killed in the enclave by Dec. 31, 2024.
Its higher casualty rate was ascribed to a larger number of indirect fatalities, which contributed to life expectancy in Gaza dropping by 44 percent in 2023 and 47 percent in 2024.
“It will be a long time before we get to a full accounting of all the people killed in Gaza, if we ever get there,” said Spagat, who has studied conflict zones for 20 years.
