NAZLET EL-SHARIF, Egypt: The 42-year-old Egyptian farmer was watering his crops along the Nile River south of the capital of Cairo and scrolling on his mobile phone when he learned that two of his sons were dead.
Ashraf Sadawy Abdel-Fattah saw a list on social media with names of Egyptians killed in the horrific flooding that tore through the city of Derna in neighboring Libya on Sunday night.
His second-eldest son, Mohamed, 23, and Abdel-Rahman, who was 19, were on the list, along with six relatives and scores of other men from their village.
“It’s a great shock for the family, but also for the entire village,” Abdel-Fattah said, speaking to The Associated Press on Thursday outside his home in Nazlet el-Sharif, a village in the province of Beni Sueif.
At least 74 men from the village, some as young as 17, were killed when Mediterranean storm Daniel unleashed heavy rainfall on Derna on Sunday night. Two dams in the mountains above the city burst, sending a wall of water two stories high that wreaked destruction and swept entire neighborhoods out to sea.
The deluge proved deadly for thousands in just seconds, uprooting apartment buildings and washing away roads and bridges. More than 11,300 people were reported killed, according to the Libyan Red Crescent — including scores of Egyptians who had lived and worked in Derna for years.
Days later, searchers are digging through mud and hollowed-out buildings in Derna for 10,000 people missing and feared dead.
“It was like hell,” said Rashad Ezzat Abdel-Hamid, a 45-year-old Egyptian who survived the disaster. He said he and seven other Egyptians rushed to the roof of their three-story building when the wall of water surged through their street in the city center.
An untold number of people were washed away in the densely populated urban area, said Abdel-Hamid. When he came down after the surge subsided, it was a scene of horror.
Lifeless bodies, clothes, wrecked cars and furniture lay everywhere in the streets, inundated with mud and debris. Buildings had collapsed or were partially destroyed. Around him, people were wailing and crying, looking for their loved ones and trying to retrieve those under the rubble.
“Entire families drowned inside their homes. Others washed way to the sea,” said Abdel-Hamid, who returned to Egypt on Thursday. “Nothing was left but rubble.”
In comments to the Saudi-owned Al Arabia television station, Derna Mayor Abdel-Moneim Al-Ghaithi said earlier this week the death toll could climb up to 20,000, given the number of neighborhoods hit by the wall of water.
Thousands of Egyptians were living in Derna, most of them working in construction projects in the city and the surrounding areas, said Abdel-Hamid. He had gone there only six months ago.
Egyptians have for decades gravitated to oil-rich Libya for work. In recent years, young Egyptians, like other Middle Eastern and African people fleeing conflicts and poverty, also used Libya as a transit point to try to reach Europe, across the Mediterranean Sea.
Libyan authorities say that so far, bodies of 145 Egyptians killed in Derna have been found. Dozens were buried in Libya, while 84 were taken to the nearby city of Tobruk and flown home, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry said.
In Nazlet el-Sharif, 167 kilometers (103 miles) from Cairo, 74 village men were buried in a mass funeral on Wednesday attended by local officials and hundreds of villagers.
The grief reverberates through the poor farming village, where cows and donkeys share dirt roads with cars, motorbikes and horse-drawn carts. Village homes face date palms groves and the fields are green with clover, corn and other grains.
“Some families lost one son, some two, and others lost three,” said Moustafa Aweis Moustafa, a retired civil servant. “These young men went there to help their families.”
Abdel-Fattah’s Mohammed went to Libya three years ago to try to make their lives better, working as a day laborer in Derna, sending whatever money he could save to his father to keep the family going as Egypt sunk deeper into an economic crisis.
Earlier this year, Abdel-Rahman joined his brother in Derna after two years unsuccessfully looking for work in Egypt, their father said.
The last time spoke to them was on Sep. 8, a half-hour video call with the rest of the family. Mohamed talked to his mother about plans to marry and eagerly listened to news of how his new apartment was coming along. His father was building it for him, adding a third floor to the family home.
Abdel-Fattah’s three nephews also died in Derna. Their mother, his sister-in-law, is in shock, unable to speak four days later, he said.
“The whole family has been ruined,” he said.
He finds little solace in the fact that he has been able to bury his sons — his heart goes out to other villagers, whose boys were buried hundreds of miles away in mass graves in Libya.
He keeps looking at the photos of his sons on his phone, and tears choke him up over and over again.
“They wanted us to live a better life,” he said of his two sons. “It’s a disaster, a disaster the whole village.”
Egyptian village mourns scores of its men killed in flooding in Libya where they worked for years
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Egyptian village mourns scores of its men killed in flooding in Libya where they worked for years
- At least 74 men from the village, some as young as 17, were killed when Mediterranean storm Daniel unleashed heavy rainfall on Derna on Sunday night
- The deluge proved deadly for thousands in just seconds, uprooting apartment buildings and washing away roads and bridges
Western nations urge Israel to comply with international law in Gaza
- Israel denies blocking humanitarian aid and says it needs to eliminate Hamas for its own protection
- The Western nations said they were opposed to “a full-scale military operation in Rafah” and called on Israel to let humanitarian aid reach the population
ROME: Israel must comply with international law in Gaza and address the devastating humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian enclave, a group of Western nations wrote in a letter to the Israeli government seen by Reuters on Friday.
All countries belonging to the Group of Seven (G7) major democracies, apart from the United States, signed the letter, along with Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.
The five-page letter comes as Israeli forces bear down on the southern Gaza city of Rafah as part of its drive to eradicate Hamas, despite warnings this could result in mass casualties in an area where displaced civilians have found shelter.
“In exerting its right to defend itself, Israel must fully comply with international law, including international humanitarian law,” the letter said, reiterating “outrage” for the Oct. 7 Hamas raid into Israel which triggered the conflict.
Israel denies blocking humanitarian aid and says it needs to eliminate Hamas for its own protection.
The Western nations said they were opposed to “a full-scale military operation in Rafah” and called on Israel to let humanitarian aid reach the population “through all relevant crossing points, including the one in Rafah.”
“According to UN estimates, an intensified military offensive would affect approximately 1.4 million people,” the letter said, underscoring the need “for specific, concrete and measurable steps” to significantly boost the flow of aid.
The letter recognizes Israel made progress in addressing a number of issues, including letting more aid trucks into the Gaza Strip, the reopening of the Erez crossing into northern Gaza and the temporary use of Ashdod port in southern Israel.
But it called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to do more, including working toward a “sustainable ceasefire,” facilitating further evacuations and resuming “electricity, water and telecommunication services.”
Since Oct. 7 Israel’s Gaza offensive has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, local health officials say.
Gaza fighting rages after Israel vows to intensify Rafah offensive
- Fierce battles overnight in and around the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip
- Israeli warships launched strikes on Rafah, on the border with Egypt
RAFAH: Fighting raged Friday in Gaza after Israel vowed to intensify its ground offensive in Rafah despite international concerns for the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians in the southern city.
With Gazans facing hunger, the US military said “trucks carrying humanitarian assistance began moving ashore via a temporary pier” it set up to aid Palestinians in the besieged territory.
Witnesses reported fierce battles overnight in and around the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.
Israeli helicopters carried out heavy strikes around Jabalia while army artillery hit homes near Kamal Adwan hospital in the camp, they said.
The bodies of six people were retrieved and several wounded people were evacuated after an air strike targeted a house in Jabalia, Gaza’s Civil Defense agency said.
Rescue teams were trying to recover people from under the rubble of the Shaaban family home on Al-Faluja Street in the camp, it added.
Witnesses said Israeli warships launched strikes on Rafah, on the border with Egypt, where more than 1.4 million Palestinian civilians have been sheltering.
Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement that it “targeted enemy forces stationed inside the Rafah border crossing... with mortar shells.”
The war broke out after the October 7 attack on southern Israel which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Out of 252 people taken hostage that day, 128 are still being held inside Gaza, including 38 who the army says are dead.
Israel vowed in response to crush Hamas and launched a military offensive on Gaza, where at least 35,303 people have been killed since the war erupted, according to data provided by the health ministry of Hamas-run territory.
Intensified ground operations
Israel has vowed to “intensify” its ground offensive in Rafah, in defiance of global warnings over the fate of Palestinians sheltering there.
Israel’s top ally the United States has joined other major powers in appealing for it to hold back from a full ground offensive in Rafah.
But Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Thursday said “additional forces will enter” the Rafah area and “this activity will intensify.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Thursday that the ground assault on Rafah was a “critical” part of the army’s mission to destroy Hamas and prevent any repetition of the October 7 attack.
“The battle in Rafah is critical... It’s not just the rest of their battalions, it’s also like an oxygen line for them for escape and resupply,” he said.
The Israeli siege of Gaza has brought dire shortages of food as well as safe water, medicines and fuel for its 2.4 million people.
The arrival of occasional aid convoys has slowed to a trickle since Israeli forces took control last week of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing.
UN denounces ‘intimidation and harassment’ of lawyers in Tunisia
- Civil society in the North African country condemned the arrests as a crackdown on dissent in the country
- The European Union expressed concern this week over the arrests
GENEVA: The United Nations on Friday denounced recent arrests of lawyers in Tunisia, saying the detentions, which have also included journalists and political commentators, undermined the rule of law in the North Africa country.
“Reported raids in the past week on the Tunisia Bar Association undermine the rule of law and violate international standards on the protection of the independence and function of lawyers,” Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told reporters in Geneva.
“Such actions constitute forms of intimidation and harassment.”
The arrests have sparked condemnations by Tunisia’s civil society and have sparked an international backlash, which Tunisia’s President Kais Saied has slammed as foreign “interference.”
Civil society in the North African country condemned the arrests as a crackdown on dissent in the country that saw the onset of the Arab Spring.
The European Union expressed concern this week over the arrests, while the United States said they contradicted the universal rights guaranteed by the country’s constitution.
Saied, who seized sweeping powers in 2021, on Thursday ordered the foreign ministry to summon ambassadors of several countries and inform them that “Tunisia is an independent state,” in a video released by his office.
Israel strikes on Lebanon kill three, says source close to Hezbollah
- Israeli strikes targeted Najjariyeh and Addousiyeh
- The NNA reported “victims” without elaborating
BEIRUT: Israeli air strikes on Friday hit an area of southern Lebanon far from the border, Lebanese official media said, with a source close to Hezbollah reporting three dead including two Syrian nationals.
The Iran-backed armed group, a Hamas ally, has traded cross-border fire with Israeli forces almost daily since the Palestinian group’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, now in its eighth month.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said “Israeli strikes targeted Najjariyeh and Addousiyeh,” two adjacent villages about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the Israeli border just south of the coastal city of Sidon.
The NNA reported “victims” without elaborating.
A source close to Hezbollah told AFP that three people were killed in Najjariyeh — two Syrians and a Lebanese man.
An AFP photographer saw ambulances heading to the targeted sites, saying the strikes hit a pickup truck in Najjariyeh and an orchard.
Hezbollah — which has escalated its cross-border attacks in recent days, prompting Israeli strikes deeper into Lebanese territory — announced Friday it had launched “attack drones” on Israeli military positions.
It came a day after the powerful Lebanese group said it had attacked an army position in Metula, a border town in northern Israel, wounding three soldiers.
Hezbollah said the attack was carried out with an “attack drone carrying two S5 rockets,” which are normally launched from jets.
Also on Thursday the group announced the deaths of two of its fighters in Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon. The NNA said they were killed when their car was targeted.
Hezbollah earlier on Thursday said it had launched dozens of Katyusha rockets at Israeli positions in the annexed Golan Heights.
Israel retaliated with overnight air raids on Lebanon’s eastern Baalbek region, a Hezbollah stronghold near the Syrian border.
Earlier this week Hezbollah said it had targeted an Israeli base near Tiberias, about 30 kilometers from the Lebanese border — one of the group’s deepest attacks into Israeli territory since clashes began on October 8.
The Wednesday strike came a day after the death of a Hezbollah member, which Israel said was a field commander, in an attack on southern Lebanon.
The cross-border fighting has killed at least 418 people in Lebanon, mostly militants but also including 80 civilians, according to an AFP tally.
Israel says 14 soldiers and 10 civilians have been killed on its side of the border.
UN rights chief warns Sudan commanders of catastrophe in Al-Fashir
- Violence escalated near Sudan’s Al-Fashir this week
GENEVA: The UN human rights chief said on Friday he was “horrified” by escalating violence near Sudan’s al-Fashir and held discussions this week with commanders from both sides of the conflict, warning of a humanitarian disaster if the city is attacked.
Hundreds of thousands of people are sheltering in al-Fashir without basic supplies amid fears that nearby fighting will turn into an all-out battle for the city, the Sudanese army’s last stronghold in the western Darfur region.
Its capture would be a major boost for the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as regional and international powers try to push the sides to negotiate an end to a 13-month war.
Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for High Commissioner Volker Turk, said Turk had held two parallel phone calls this week with Sudan army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the leader of the RSF, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, urging them to de-escalate.
"The High Commissioner warned both commanders that fighting in (al-Fashir), where more than 1.8 million residents and internally displaced people are currently encircled and at imminent risk of famine, would have a catastrophic impact on civilians, and would deepen intercommunal conflict with disastrous humanitarian consequences," she said at a UN press briefing in Geneva, adding that Turk was "horrified" by recent violence there.
The UN human rights office said at least 58 people had been killed around al-Fashir since last week.
