CAIRO: Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh arrived in Cairo Tuesday for talks with Egyptian officials, the militant group said, days after mediators said prospects for a new truce with Israel had dimmed.
The Qatar-based head of Hamas’s political bureau will “hold discussions with Egyptian officials on the political situation and the situation in the field,” a statement said.
The delegation will also discuss “efforts to stop the aggression, provide relief to citizens and achieve the goals of our Palestinian people,” it added.
Despite a flurry of meetings with both Israeli and Hamas negotiators last week, Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators made no headway in their efforts to pause more than four months of relentless fighting.
“The pattern in the last few days is not really very promising,” Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
In a statement on Saturday, Haniyeh renewed Hamas’s demands, even though some of them have been dismissed as “delusional” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The demands include a ceasefire, an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, an end to Israel’s blockade of the territory and safe shelter for hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas in response to its unprecedented October 7 attack that resulted in the deaths of 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Its retaliatory offensive has killed 29,195 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Hamas chief in Cairo for Gaza truce talks
https://arab.news/gcnag
Hamas chief in Cairo for Gaza truce talks
- Qatar-based head of Hamas’s political bureau will hold talks with Egyptian officials
Libya’s security authorities free more than 200 migrants from ‘secret prison’, two security sources say
- Security authorities had found an underground prison, nearly three meters deep, which the sources said was run by a Libyan human trafficker
BENGHAZI: Libya’s security authorities have freed more than 200 migrants from what they described as a secret prison in the town of Kufra in the southeast of the country after they were held captive in inhuman conditions, two security sources from the city told Reuters on Sunday.
The security sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the security authorities had found an underground prison, nearly three meters deep, which the sources said was run by a Libyan human trafficker.
One of the sources said this person had not yet been detained.
“Some of the freed migrants were held captive up to two years in the underground cells,” this source said.
The other source said what the operation had found was “one of the most serious crimes against humanity that has been uncovered in the region.”
“The operation resulted in a raid on a secret prison within the city, where several inhumane underground detention cells were uncovered,” one of the sources added.
The freed migrants are from sub-Saharan Africa, mainly from Somalia and Eritrea, including women and children, the sources said. Kufra lies in eastern Libya, about 1,700 kilometers (1,000 miles) from the capital Tripoli.
Libya has become a transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe via dangerous routes across the desert and over the Mediterranean since the toppling of Muammar Qaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.
The oil-based Libyan economy is also a draw for impoverished migrants seeking work, but security throughout the sprawling country is poor, leaving migrants vulnerable to abuses.
At least 21 bodies of migrants were found in a mass grave in eastern Libya last week, with up to 10 survivors in the group bearing signs of having been tortured before they were freed from captivity, two security sources told Reuters.
Libya’s attorney general said in a statement on Friday the authorities in the east of the country had referred a defendant to the court for trial in connection with the mass grave on charges of “committing serious violations against migrants.”
In February last year, 39 bodies of migrants were recovered from about 55 mass graves in Kufra. The town houses tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees who fled the conflict that erupted in Sudan in 2023.
