PORT SUDAN: Thousands have fled a southern Sudan town, residents said Monday, after attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, at war with the army for nearly six months.
RSF fighters on dozens of armed vehicles attacked the town of Wad Ashana, on the border between North Kordofan and White Nile states, on Saturday, according to residents.
“My neighbor and my cousin were both killed in the crossfire. It was hours of terror,” Al-Tayeb Abdelbaqi told AFP from El Odaydab, a town 10 kilometers away to which he could eventually flee, sheltering with a relative along with three other families.
By early September, the war between Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, which began on April 15, had killed nearly 7,500 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project.
The worst of the violence has been concentrated in Khartoum and the western region of Darfur, but North Kordofan — a crossroads between the capital and Darfur — has also seen fighting.
Almost 4.3 million people have been displaced by the fighting within Sudan, in addition to around 1.2 million more who have fled across borders.
Dozens of families like Abdelbaqi’s, who fled to save their lives but left everything behind, were holed up in schools in the area.
“We left with only the clothes on our backs,” said another resident, Ahmed, who used to own a store in Wad Ashana and asked to only be identified by his first name for fear of retaliation.
He said the local market “had been completely looted.” The same allegation has followed RSF attacks across Sudan since the war began.
Footage posted to social media on Sunday by the RSF claimed to show fighters “taking over the Wad Ashana garrison in North Kordofan and advancing toward Kosti,” the last major town on the road to South Sudan.
The Sudanese Armed Forces have not yet issued any comment on the situation there.
According to Abdelbaqi, the area had been spared the fighting, until last week, when “an army force set up camp west of town.”
Three days later, “the RSF attacked the city, completely overtaking it and pushing the army” 35 kilometers east, he said.
Already one of the world’s poorest countries, the war has brought a humanitarian catastrophe to Sudan, where millions are on the brink of famine, and diseases are spreading, according to the United Nations.
Thousands flee Sudan town as war grips country’s south: witnesses
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Thousands flee Sudan town as war grips country’s south: witnesses
- RSF fighters attacked the town of Wad Ashana, on the border between North Kordofan and White Nile states, on Saturday
Gaza reaching ‘humanity’s darkest hour,’ says WHO
- Many families fleeing south to Rafah which is already overcrowded with dire conditions
GENEVA, GAZA STRIP: The situation in the Gaza Strip is getting worse all the time and approaching humanity’s “darkest hour,” the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.
Israel declared war on Hamas after the militant group’s Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and which saw around 240 hostages taken back to Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel has vowed to eradicate Hamas and secure the release of all the hostages. The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza says the war has killed nearly 15,900 people in the territory.
Here are some of the key concerns being raised by the WHO and other UN agencies:
Richard Peeperkorn, the WHO’s representative in the occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters in Geneva, via video link from Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, that the number of people on the move from central and southern Gaza was “vastly increasing.”
Israeli forces battled Hamas militants in southern Gaza on Tuesday, with fighting pushing civilians into a steadily shrinking area of the besieged Palestinian enclave.
FASTFACT
Most of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless by the war, and the new phase of displacement since a weeklong truce ended on Dec. 1 is worsening an already catastrophic situation.
After initially focusing on northern Gaza, the Israeli army has now sent ground forces into the south and urged civilians to evacuate.
“The situation is getting worse by the hour. There is intensified bombing going on all around, including here in the southern areas,” said Peeperkorn.
“A lot of people are desperate and almost in a permanent state of shock.”
“We are close by humanity’s darkest hour,” Peeperkorn said.
“These bombings and the senseless loss of life must stop now, and we need a sustained cease-fire.”
Early in the conflict, the WHO established two adjacent warehouses in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza but said on Tuesday it had to find a smaller one in Rafah after being advised to move by Israel’s military.
“We comply because we want to make sure that you can actually deliver essential medical supplies,” said Peeperkorn.
The WHO managed to scramble out 90 percent of the stockpile in “a panic movement.”
“And we had to abort the mission we were planning to do to bring supplies to the hospitals.
“This ... should be our top priority, to get a sustained line of the most essential medical supplies, trauma supplies, essential drugs into Gaza,” and then distribute it to health facilities.
He said the amount of aid that the WHO had been able to bring into Gaza was “way too little.”
“For this kind of humanitarian disaster, where we are in an increasing disaster, we need much more supplies and equipment in,” he said.
Eighteen of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals are still functioning in any capacity: Three are providing basic first aid only, while the rest are delivering partial services. Twelve of the 18 are in the south.
There are 1,400 hospital beds still available in the Gaza Strip. The WHO says 5,000 are needed.
Peeperkorn said that since the start of the war, there had been 120,000 acute respiratory infections; close to 26,000 people with scabies and lice; 86,000 cases of diarrhea, including 44,000 among children aged under five, which he said was 20 to 30 times higher than could be expected.
Meanwhile some 1,150 cases of jaundice have been recorded, along with cases of chicken pox, skin rashes and meningitis.
James Elder, spokesman for the UN children’s agency UNICEF, said that with the population on the move, in two hours “there are 5,000 people where there was noone previously. Critically in these places, there’s no sanitation.”
Speaking from Cairo after returning from Gaza, he said that in one shelter in Gaza, where 30,000 people were seeking refuge, there was one toilet for roughly every 400 people, meaning queues of up to five hours.
Israel directing civilians toward zones it has designated as safe — but which have no toilets or clean water — is creating “the perfect storm for disease outbreak,” said Elder.
“Israel is the occupying power: it’s they who have to provide food, water, medicine,” he added.
Fearful of being killed in an Israeli bombardment, families in Gaza were packing up and fleeing on Tuesday, heading for a pocket of land further south already crammed with displaced people without enough food, water or toilets.
Some were fleeing for the third or fourth time in less than two months.
Most of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless by the war,
and the new phase of displacement since a week-long
truce ended on Dec. 1 is worsening an already catastrophic humanitarian situation.
In Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where Israel was launching a long-awaited assault, Palestinians who had sought protection from airstrikes by camping in the grounds of the city’s Nasser Hospital were rolling up their tents and loading cars or donkey carts with piles of mats and blankets.
“We are getting ready to leave Khan Younis, heading to Rafah. We have been here for about 50 days,” said Abu Omar, a middle-aged man who left his home in the eastern part of the city and had been sheltering at the hospital camp with his family.
Rafah, further south on the border with Egypt, is one of the last remaining areas where the Israeli military has said civilians could go to escape the fighting, although it has been hit by many airstrikes.
“There is no safe place ... but at the end, we head to wherever we think there might be a bit of safety,” said Abu Omar, standing by a car whose roof was piled high with possessions.
But in Rafah, displaced people said their living conditions were horrible.
“There are no bathrooms. We cannot even wash if we want to pray. There is no place for us to wash or pray. If we want to wash our kids’ hands there is no place for that. There is not even a place where you can bake or get bread,” said Enas Mosleh, sitting with her children in a shelter made out of wooden slats and transparent plastic sheets.
“We spend all night hearing rockets and bombing. We are living between life and death. We may die at any moment,” she said, her face streaked with tears.
US sales of Palestinian keffiyehs soar, even as wearers targeted
- Hirbawi, which has patented its brand, sells scarves internationally via its US and German websites and on Amazon
WASHINGTON: A growing number of Americans are donning the keffiyeh, the distinctive patterned scarf that’s closely linked with Palestinians, to demand a ceasefire to Israel’s attacks on Gaza or to signal their support for Palestinians.
Sales of the scarves have jumped since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, US distributors say, even as keffiyehs have been forcibly removed by security forces at some protests and wearers report being targeted for verbal and physical abuse.
“It was like a light switch. All of a sudden, we had hundreds of people on the website simultaneously and buying whatever they could,” said Azar Aghayev, the US distributor for Hirbawi, which opened in 1961 and is the only manufacturer of keffiyehs left in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“In two days, the stock that we had was just gone, and not just gone, it was oversold.”
Hirbawi, which has patented its brand, sells scarves internationally via its US and German websites and on Amazon. All 40 variations on the US website, which include many in bright colors as well as the traditional black and white, are sold out, Aghayev said.
Unit sales of keffiyeh scarves have risen 75 percent in the 56 days between Oct. 7 and Dec. 2 on Amazon.com compared with the previous 56 days. Searches for “Palestinian scarf for women” rose by 159 percent in the three months to Dec. 4 compared with the previous three months.
UK’s Sunak tells Netanyahu in call of disappointment at new fighting in Gaza
- Downing Street spokesperson: ‘The PM expressed disappointment about the breakdown of the pause in fighting in Gaza, which had allowed hostages to be released’
- Spokesperson: ‘The leaders discussed urgent efforts to ensure all remaining hostages are safely freed and to allow any remaining British nationals in Gaza to leave’
LONDON: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his disappointment about the breakdown of the pause in fighting in Gaza in a call with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, his office said in a readout.
“The Prime Minister spoke to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this afternoon. He expressed disappointment about the breakdown of the pause in fighting in Gaza, which had allowed hostages to be released,” a Downing Street spokesperson said.
“The leaders discussed urgent efforts to ensure all remaining hostages are safely freed and to allow any remaining British nationals in Gaza to leave.”
Sunak’s spokeperson said the British prime minister stressed the need for Israel to take greater care to protect civilians in Gaza and for humanitarian aid to be allowed to enter the Palestinian enclave.
Defense minister Grant Shapps said Britain was considering sending a military support vessel to provide medical and humanitarian aid in the Middle East.
Jordan’s King Abdullah says world should condemn any attempt to forcibly expel Palestinians
- Talks with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides focused on the need to increase efforts to deliver humanitarian aid and relief to the embattled civilians living in Gaza
- King Abdullah told Christodoulides there would be dangerous consequences from any attempt to forcibly push Palestinians en masse from their land
AMMAN: Jordan’s King Abdullah said on Tuesday the world should condemn any attempt by Israel to create conditions that would forcibly displace Palestinians within the war-devastated Gaza Strip or outside its borders.
In remarks carried by state media after a meeting with the Cypriot president in Amman, the monarch again called for an immediate cease-fire and warned that Israel’s relentless bombing campaign was leading to a “dangerous deterioration” in the situation.
Talks with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides focused on the need to increase efforts to deliver humanitarian aid and relief to the embattled civilians living in Gaza.
Abdullah has lobbied Western leaders to pile pressure on Israel to allow an uninterrupted flow of aid and open crossings it controls to bring in sufficient level of aid needed.
Israel now controls the volume and nature of aid entering to over 2.3 million inhabitants under siege, according to UN officials and humanitarian workers.
UNRWA officials say only a trickle of the aid the enclave needs is getting through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt which NGOs and officials say can only handle a fraction of the needs.
Israel started its campaign in retribution for an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas fighters who rampaged through Israeli towns, killing 1,200 people and seizing 240 hostages, according to Israel’s tally.
Israeli bombardments have killed nearly 16,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health ministry figures, and driven 80 percent of the population from their homes.
King Abdullah told Christodoulides there would be dangerous consequences from any attempt to forcibly push Palestinians en masse from their land while it maintained security control, officials said.
Officials also fear wider violence in the West Bank, which Jordan borders, as settler attacks on Palestinian civilians, confiscation of land and Israeli military raids mount.
It could create circumstances that could encourage Israel to forcibly push tens of thousands of Palestians across the Jordan River.
Officials say the forcible expulsion of Palestinians would amount to a declaration of war and prompt Jordan to suspend its peace treaty with Israel.
On Tuesday, Amman condemned Israel’s move to build new settlements in Arab East Jerusalem, the part of the contested city that was seized along with the West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the UN considers occupied territory..
“Israel’s expansion of Jewish settlement building on land it occupied and the confiscation of territory are a flagrant violation of international law” and dimmed any prospects of peace, said Sufain Qudah, spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry.
Egypt’s FM heads to US for talks with top officials
- Shoukry will meet Congress foreign policy committee officials with the aim of advancing and strengthening strategic relations
- Visit will also include talks with a number of American think tanks and research centers
CAIRO: Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry traveled to the US on Tuesday to meet House of Representatives and Senate members in Washington.
Shoukry will meet Congress foreign policy committee officials with the aim of advancing and strengthening strategic relations, according to Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid.
The visit will also include talks with a number of American think tanks and research centers, in addition to media engagements, he said.
Abu Zeid said that Shoukry will also join an Arab-Islamic ministerial committee meeting on Dec. 7.
The committee will hold meetings with the US secretary of state, a number of Congress members and the US media in an effort to stop the war in Gaza, in line with the mandate issued by the recent Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit.
Meanwhile, Shoukry affirmed Egypt’s categorical rejection of attempts to force Palestinians out of Gaza.
The foreign minister made the remarks during a phone call with Colombian counterpart Alvaro Leyva.
Shoukry and Leyva discussed the deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, the necessity of an immediate ceasefire and the opportunity to establish humanitarian truces to bring in aid.
