BEIRUT: Scores of protesters clashed with riot police in Beirut on Thursday as they tried to break into the chief offices of Lebanon’s judiciary after officials moved to cripple the probe into the massive port explosion that wreaked havoc on the capital city in 2020.
Several demonstrators were wounded as police pushed back crowds from outside Beirut’s Palace of Justice, beating people with batons.
On Wednesday, Lebanon chief prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat ordered the release of all suspects detained in the investigation into the deadly port blast in Beirut, and filed charges against the judge leading the probe, Tarek Bitar.
Among those released was an American citizen whose detention without trial had drawn threats of sanctions from US officials, and who promptly left Lebanon, circumventing a travel ban.
Bitar on Monday resumed the investigation based on his legal interpretation, following a 13-month halt over legal challenges raised by politicians accused in the probe. He also charged more than a dozen senior political, judicial, and security officials, including Oueidat.
The recent developments have led to a standoff between the two judges, who each claim the other is breaking the law, crippling Lebanon’s judiciary, as the country’s cash-strapped institutions continue to decay.
Lebanon’s Higher Judicial Council failed to meet as scheduled on Thursday to discuss Bitar’s “judicial coup d’état.”
The council’s members said they avoided convening due to public pressure and MPs’ interference with the judiciary.
During Thursday’s protests, MPs were hit and a lawyer was handcuffed by security officers.
Hundreds of families of Beirut blast victims rallied near the Justice Palace to protest against a decision by the Higher Judicial Council to remove Bitar from the investigation. They expressed their anger at Oueidat, demanding his removal from the case and describing his move as “a scandal.”
Willam Noun, spokesman for the families of the Beirut Port Blast victims, told Arab News: “It was an unexpected decision that we are not contented with.
“We did not expect this absurdity. They are settling their scores with our martyrs’ blood.
“We prefer to find justice from our country’s judiciary, however, after what has happened, we call on an international investigation into the crime.”
Peter Bou Saeb, a brother of one of the victims, said: “We were shocked by the decision to release the detainees.
“This case has turned into a confrontation between us and the judiciary; Let them deal with the consequences.
The mother of victim Jack Baramakian, who held her son’s photo while weeping, said: “My son was guilty of being at home; We live opposite the explosion site, and seven of our neighbors died in our building. Who will do us justice?”
Families held banners demanding the “overthrow of the police regime,” stressing that “justice will happen” and “failing to speak up is a crime.”
They stood in solidarity with Bitar, who resumed his work despite the political disruption deterring his investigation into one of Lebanon’s biggest disasters.
Families called on the Higher Judicial Council to protect the course of the investigation and put an end to political pressure on Bitar that aims to implement the agenda of the political class.
They held the security agencies responsible for the safety of the judge as well as private documents relating to the case.
Some Reformist MPs joined the angry victims’ families and met caretaker Justice Minister Henri Khoury to discuss the move against Bitar.
The meeting devolved into a heated exchange and state security officers, who are duty-bound to protect the minister, restrained the MPs.
Angry protesters broke into the Ministry of Justice, throwing rocks and unlocking an access gate, allowing crowds to enter. However, riot police struck back by hitting demonstrators with batons, causing several injuries.
Lawyer and activist Wassef Harake was seen handcuffed and dragged by security officers inside the justice palace building.
MP Adib Abdel Massih told protesters that he was assaulted by security agents and had his phone seized.
MP Paula Yaacoubian said: “This is a lunatic asylum and justice is being evaded.”
MP Mark Daou said: “Oueidat’s move is a coup; This is not judicial work; it is political.” He denied that MPs interfered with the judiciary.
Among those released by Oueidat was Beirut Port head of security Mohammad Ziad Al-Ouf, a dual US Lebanese citizen.
According to security and judiciary sources, several Lebanese citizens received messages from the US warning that they will be subject to the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act if fail to address the fate of American national Al-Ouf, who was detained without trial for two and a half years. “Arbitrary arrest rules apply to Al-Ouf and his file has reached Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, and currently awaits his signature,” the message said.
In the event that Blinken signs the file, sanctions will be imposed on the Lebanese state, and penalties will be imposed on those who interfered with the case, including judges and ministers.
Activist Nizar Zakka, who was wrongfully detained in Iranian prisons for years, tweeted: “US citizen Ziad Al-Ouf, freed from unlawful detention in Lebanon for more than two years, is thankfully on his way home to the US.
“He will finally be reunited with his family.”
A photo of Al-Ouf smiling onboard a plane next to his family circulated on Wednesday night shortly after his release.
Oueidat imposed a travel ban on detainees who were released, justifying his move to journalists on Thursday, saying: “Implementing a travel ban requires five hours.”
Beirut blast victims’ relatives rally for embattled probe judge
https://arab.news/28yuh
Beirut blast victims’ relatives rally for embattled probe judge
- The recent developments have led to a standoff between the two judges, who each claim the other is breaking the law, crippling Lebanon’s judiciary
- Willam Noun, spokesman for the families of the Beirut Port Blast victims, told Arab News: “It was an unexpected decision that we are not contented with”
Egypt police probe murder of Israeli-Canadian businessman
- Security sources made no link between the shooting and the dead man’s ethnic background
CAIRO: Egypt’s interior ministry said it had launched an investigation Wednesday after an Israeli-Canadian businessman was shot dead in the coastal city of Alexandria.
A police statement said the man, “a permanent resident of the country” was shot dead on Tuesday.
The Israeli foreign ministry said the murdered man was a businessman with dual Canadian-Israeli citizenship.
“He had a business in Egypt. The Israeli embassy in Cairo is in contact with the Egyptian authorities, who are investigating the circumstances of the case,” the ministry said.
Attacks on Israelis in Egypt are rare but not unprecedented.
On October 8, the day after Hamas attacked Israel triggering war in Gaza, an Egyptian policeman shot dead two Israeli tourists and their Egyptian guide.
Following their deaths, Israeli authorities advised its nationals in Egypt to leave “as soon as possible.”
Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel but relations between the two peoples have never been warm.
The Egyptian government has often acted as mediator in flare-ups in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have threatened to stir up passions on the street.
Israel pounds Gaza as truce talks resume in Cairo
- AlQahera News: ‘Truce negotiations have resumed in Cairo today with all sides present’
- Moscow so far sees no prospect for a peace settlement in Gaza or the wider Middle East
RAFAH, Palestinian Territories: Israel bombarded the overcrowded Gaza city of Rafah, where it has launched a ground incursion, as talks resumed Wednesday in Cairo aimed at agreeing the terms of a truce in the seven-month war.
Despite international objections, Israel sent tanks into Rafah on Tuesday and seized the nearby crossing into Egypt that is the main conduit for aid into the besieged Palestinian territory.
The White House condemned the interruption to humanitarian deliveries, with a senior US official later revealing Washington had paused a shipment of bombs last week after Israel failed to address US concerns over its Rafah plans.
The Israeli military said hours later it was reopening another major aid crossing into Gaza, Kerem Shalom, as well as the Erez crossing.
But the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said the Kerem Shalom crossing — which Israel shut after a rocket attack killed four soldiers on Sunday — remained closed.
It came after a night of heavy Israeli strikes and shelling across Gaza. AFPTV footage showed Palestinians scrambling in the dark to pull survivors, bloodied and caked in dust, out from under the rubble of a Rafah building.
Russia said on Wednesday that the war in Gaza was escalating due to Israel’s incursion into Rafah and that Moscow so far saw no prospect for a peace settlement in Gaza or the wider Middle East.
“An additional destabilizing factor, including for the entire region, was the launch of an Israeli military ground operation in Rafah,” Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters.
“About one and a half million Palestinian civilians are concentrated there. In this regard, we demand strict compliance with the provisions of international humanitarian law.”
Speaking more broadly about efforts to find a lasting settlement in the Middle East, Zakharova said: “I would like to call it a settlement, but, alas, it is far from a settlement.”
“There are no prospects for resolving the situation in the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, the situation in the conflict zone is escalating daily.”
“We are living in Rafah in extreme fear and endless anxiety as the occupation army keeps firing artillery shells indiscriminately,” said Muhanad Ahmad Qishta, 29.
“Rafah is a witnessing a very large displacement, as places the Israeli army claims to be safe are also being bombed,” he said.
The Gaza war was sparked by 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 in response vowed to crush Hamas and launched a military offensive that has killed at least 34,789 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Militants also took around 250 people hostage, of whom Israel estimates 128 remain in Gaza, including 36 who are believed to be dead.
Talks aimed at agreeing a ceasefire resumed in Cairo on Wednesday “in the presence of all parties,” Egyptian media reported.
A senior Hamas official said the latest round of negotiations would be “decisive.”
“The resistance insists on the rightful demands of its people and will not give up any of our people’s rights,” he said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the negotiations.
The official had previously warned it would be Israel’s “last chance” to free the scores of hostages still in militants’ hands.
Mediators have failed to broker a new truce since a week-long ceasefire in November saw 105 hostages freed, the Israelis among them in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Mediator Qatar urges international community to prevent Rafah ‘genocide’
- Israel struck targets in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday after seizing the main border crossing with Egypt
- African Union condemns the Israeli military’s moves into southern Gaza’s Rafah
DOHA: Qatar called on the international community on Wednesday to prevent a “genocide” in Rafah following Israel’s seizure of the Gaza city’s crossing with Egypt and threats of a wider assault.
In a statement the Gulf state, which has been mediating between Israel and militant group Hamas, appealed “for urgent international action to prevent the city from being invaded and a crime of genocide being committed.”
Israel struck targets in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday after seizing the main border crossing with Egypt. Israel has vowed for weeks to launch a ground incursion into Rafah, despite a clamour of international objection.
The attacks on the southern city, which is packed with displaced civilians, came as negotiators and mediators met in Cairo to try to hammer out a hostage-release and truce deal in the seven-month war.
Qatar, which has hosted Hamas’s political office in Doha since 2012, has been engaged — along with Egypt and the United States — in months of behind-the-scenes mediation between Israel and the Palestinian group.
The African Union condemned Wednesday the Israeli military’s moves into southern Gaza’s Rafah, calling for the international community to stop “this deadly escalation” of the war.
AU Commission chief Moussa Faki Mahamat “firmly condemns the extension of this war to the Rafah crossing,” said a statement after Israeli tanks captured the key corridor for humanitarian aid into the besieged Palestinian territory.
Faki “expresses his extreme concern at the war undertaken by Israel in Gaza which results, at every moment, in massive deaths and systematic destruction of the conditions of human life,” the statement said.
“He calls on the entire international community to effectively coordinate collective action to stop this deadly escalation.”
Israel says it has reopened Kerem Shalom border crossing for Gaza aid
- Erez border crossing between Israel and northern Gaza is also open for aid deliveries into the Palestinian territory
JERUSALEM: Israel said it reopened the Kerem Shalom border crossing to humanitarian aid for Gaza Wednesday, four days after closing it in response to a rocket attack that killed four soldiers.
“Trucks from Egypt carrying humanitarian aid, including food, water, shelter equipment, medicine and medical equipment donated by the international community are already arriving at the crossing,” the army said in a joint statement with COGAT, the defense ministry body that oversees Palestinian civil affairs.
The supplies will be transferred to the Gaza side of the crossing after undergoing inspection, it added.
The statement said the Erez border crossing between Israel and northern Gaza is also open for aid deliveries into the Palestinian territory.
The Kerem Shalom crossing was closed after a Hamas rocket attack killed four soldiers and wounded more than a dozen on Sunday.
On Tuesday, Israeli troops seized control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt after launching an incursion into the eastern sector of the city.
The United Nations and Israel’s staunchest ally the United States both condemned the closure of the two crossings which are a lifeline for civilians facing looming famine.
‘A blessing’: Rains refill Iraq’s drought-hit reservoirs
- The last time Darbandikhan was full was in 2019
- Iraq is considered by the United Nations to be one of the five countries most vulnerable to some impacts of climate change
Darbandikhan: The reservoir behind the massive Darbandikhan dam, tucked between the rolling mountains of northeastern Iraq, is almost full again after four successive years of drought and severe water shortages.
Iraqi officials say recent rainfall has refilled some of the water-scarce country’s main reservoirs, taking levels to a record since 2019.
“The dam’s storage capacity is three million cubic meters (106 million cubic feet). Today, with the available reserves, the dam is only missing 25 centimeters (10 inches) of water to be considered full,” Saman Ismail, director of the Darbandikhan facility, told AFP on Sunday.
Built on the River Sirwan, the dam is located south of the city of Sulaimaniyah in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region.
“In the coming days, we will be able to say that it’s full,” said Ismail, with the water just a few meters below the road running along the edge of the basin.
The last time Darbandikhan was full was in 2019, and since then “we’ve only had years of drought and shortages,” said Ismail.
He cited “climate change in the region” as a reason, “but also dam construction beyond Kurdistan’s borders.”
The central government in Baghdad says upstream dams built in neighboring Iran and Turkiye have heavily reduced water flow in Iraq’s rivers, on top of rising temperatures and irregular rainfall.
This winter, however, bountiful rains have helped to ease shortages in Iraq, considered by the United Nations to be one of the five countries most vulnerable to some impacts of climate change.
In Iraq, rich in oil but where infrastructure is often run-down, torrential rains have also flooded the streets of Kurdistan’s regional capital Irbil.
Four hikers died last week in floods in Kurdistan, and in Diyala, a rural province in central Iraq, houses were destroyed.
Ali Radi Thamer, director of the dam authority at Iraq’s water resources ministry, said that most of the country’s six biggest dams have experienced a rise in water levels.
At the Mosul dam, the largest reservoir with a capacity of about 11 billion cubic meters, “the storage level is very good, we have benefitted from the rains and the floods,” said Thamer.
Last summer, he added, Iraq’s “water reserves... reached a historic low.”
“The reserves available today will have positive effects for all sectors,” Thamer said, including agriculture and treatment plants that produce potable water, as well as watering southern Iraq’s fabled marshes that have dried up in recent years.
He cautioned that while 2019 saw “a sharp increase in water reserves,” it was followed by “four successive dry seasons.”
Water has been a major issue in Iraq, a country of 43 million people that faces a serious environmental crisis from worsening climate change, with temperatures frequently hitting 50 degrees Celsius in summer.
“Sure, today we have rain and floods, water reserves that have relatively improved, but this does not mean the end of drought,” Thamer said.
About five kilometers (three miles) south of Darbandikhan, terraces near a small riverside tourist establishment are submerged in water.
But owner Aland Salah prefers to see the glass half full.
“The water of the Sirwan river is a blessing,” he told AFP.
“When the flow increases, the area grows in beauty.
“We have some damage, but we will keep working.”
