Geneva: UN experts accused Iran Friday of “intensifying” its repression of women two years after Mahsa Amini’s death in custody, which sparked nationwide protests, including an apparent pattern of sentencing women activists to death.
Amini, 22, was an Iranian Kurdish woman who died three days after her arrest in Tehran in September 2022 for allegedly breaching Iran’s dress code which requires women to wear a headscarf.
Two years on, “Iran has intensified its efforts to suppress the fundamental rights of women and girls and crush remaining initiatives of women’s activism,” the independent UN fact-finding mission on Iran warned in a statement.
The UN Human Rights Council appointed the experts to investigate the deadly crackdown on nationwide protests that rocked Iran after Amini’s death.
“Although mass protests have subsided, the unabated defiance of women and girls is a continuous reminder that they still live in a system that relegates them to ‘second class citizens’,” said the experts, who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations.
In a fresh update, they said repression had stepped up noticeably since April.
State authorities had “increased repressive measures and policies” through the so-called “Noor Plan,” which encourages sanctioning rights violations against women and girls who flout the mandatory hijab, they said.
“Security forces have further escalated pre-existing patterns of physical violence, including beating, kicking, and slapping women and girls who are perceived as failing to comply with the mandatory hijab laws and regulations,” the team said in a statement.
They also warned that state authorities had enhanced surveillance for hijab compliance, including in private spheres like vehicles, and with a range of tools, including drones.
At the same time, a new “Hijab and Chastity” bill, which is in the final stages of approval, provides for harsher penalties for women who do not wear the mandatory hijab — including soaring fines, long prison sentences and travel bans.
In their statement, the experts expressed particular concern about “an apparent new pattern of sentencing to death of women activists... following their convictions for national security offenses.”
“Over the last two years, the death penalty and other domestic criminal law provisions, in particular those related to national security, have been used as instruments to terrorize and deter Iranians from protesting and expressing themselves freely,” they said.
Iran upping repression of women 2 years after Mahsa Amini’s death: UN experts
https://arab.news/9k5j9
Iran upping repression of women 2 years after Mahsa Amini’s death: UN experts
- Iranian Kurdish Mahsa Amini died while in custody, sparking nationwide protests
- UN experts say repression had stepped up noticeably since April in fresh update
Israeli strike hits car factory in Syria: monitor
- Israeli aircraft launched “air strikes with three missiles targeting... three trucks loaded with food and medical supplies inside an Iranian car factory,” the monitor said
BEIRUT: An Israeli strike in Syria on Sunday targeted trucks transporting aid for Lebanese people, wounding three aid workers, a war monitor said, the latest such attack on the country.
Israeli aircraft launched “air strikes with three missiles targeting... three trucks loaded with food and medical supplies inside an Iranian car factory... in southern Homs,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The attack destroyed the trucks and wounded three aid workers, said the British-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.
“The trucks crossed over from Iraq to provide humanitarian aid to Lebanese people” affected by intensifying Israeli strikes, it added.
On Friday, Lebanon said an Israeli air strike on the Syrian border cut off the main international road linking the two countries.
Israel has repeatedly targeted the border area in recent days because it says Hezbollah is bringing in weapons across the border from ally Syria.
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since the start of country’s civil war in 2011, mainly targeting army positions and Iran-backed fighters, including those of Hezbollah.
Israeli authorities rarely comment on individual strikes but have said repeatedly they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.
Iran’s Khamenei decorates commander for Israel attack
- The decoration was bestowed because of “the brilliant ‘Honest Promise’ operation”
TEHRAN: Iran’s supreme leader has decorated the Revolutionary Guards aerospace commander for the Islamic republic’s missile attacks on arch-foe Israel, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s website said on Sunday.
“Ayatollah Khamenei presented the Order of Fath (“Conquest” in Farsi) to General Amirali Hajjizadeh, commander of the Guards Aerospace Force,” it said.
The decoration was bestowed because of “the brilliant ‘Honest Promise’ operation,” the website said.
Hajjizadeh, 62, has headed the Guards aerospace unit since its creation in 2009.
On Tuesday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired some 200 missiles at Israel in retaliation for an Israeli air strike that killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and IRGC top general Abbas Nilforoushan in Beirut.
It was Iran’s second direct attack on Israel in six months, after a missile and drone assault in April in retaliation for a deadly strike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, which Tehran blamed on Israel.
Israel has vowed to respond after Tuesday’s Iranian missile attack.
One killed in shooting attack in southern Israel
- Seriously injured woman was being treated at the scene while eight other people were injured in the attack
JERUSALEM: At least one person was killed and 10 others injured Sunday during a shooting in southern Israel’s Beer Sheva, police and emergency responders said, a day before the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack.
“Paramedics have pronounced a 25-year-old female deceased, and are evacuating 10 casualties,” emergency service provider Magen David Adom said in a statement.
Police said the incident was being treated as a “suspected terrorist attack.”
“A short time ago a report was received at the police headquarters about a suspected shooting incident at the central station in Beer Sheva,” said a police spokesman in a statement.
“A number of injured on the scene. The terrorist was neutralized at the scene and many police forces of the southern district are at the scene,” the statement added.
The incident comes just days after a Hamas-claimed shooting attack last week in which seven people were killed in Israel’s commercial hub of Tel Aviv.
The Tel Aviv attack — one of the deadliest in the country since the October 7 Hamas attack — came as Iran fired about 200 missiles at Israel, sending hundreds of thousands of people into public shelters.
Israel and Hamas have been at war in Gaza since the October 7 attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 41,870 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has said the figures are reliable.
Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon
Beirut: In a south Lebanon hospital, Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert peered out of the window after bombardment near the Israeli border, four decades after he first worked in the country.
“It’s a horrible experience,” he said in a video call from the southern town of Nabatiyeh.
“It’s been 42 years and nothing has changed,” said Gilbert, who first saw war treating patients during the 1982 Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut.
Below the window paramedics were on standby next to parked ambulances at the hospital behind the front line.
The anaesthetist and emergency medicine specialist said he had seen just a few cases since arriving on Tuesday.
“Most of the cases have been south of us and they have not been able to evacuate them because the attacks have been so vicious,” Gilbert said.
Israel has increased its air strikes against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah since September 23, pounding the south of the country and later staging what it called “limited operations” across the border.
On Thursday the Israeli army warned residents to leave Nabatiyeh.
The escalation has killed more than 1,100 people and wounded at least another 3,600, and pushed upwards of a million people to flee their homes, according to government figures.
Official media have reported some Israeli strikes killing entire families, and AFP has spoken to two people who lost 17 relatives and 10 family members respectively.
Israel’s military “can do whatever they want to health care, to ambulances, to churches, to mosques, to universities, as they’ve been doing in Gaza,” said Gilbert, who has repeatedly volunteered in the Palestinian territory during past conflicts.
“And now we see the same repeat itself in Lebanon in 2024.”
A hospital in the town of Bint Jbeil closer to the border on Saturday said it was hit by heavy overnight Israeli strikes, wounding nine medical and nursing staff, most seriously.
At least four hospitals said they had suspended work amid ongoing Israeli bombardment on Friday, and Hezbollah-affiliated paramedics said 11 personnel were killed in Israeli raids in south Lebanon.
On Thursday, Lebanon’s health minister said more than 40 paramedics and firefighters had been killed by Israeli fire in three days.
UN official Imran Riza on X on Saturday spoke of “an alarming increase in attacks against health care in Lebanon.”
Britain said reports that Israeli strikes had hit “health facilities and support personnel” in Lebanon were “deeply disturbing.”
Israel has claimed Hezbollah uses ambulances for “terrorist purposes.”
In the capital Beirut, British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah said he also saw parallels with the conflict in Gaza.
Abu-Sittah has tirelessly campaigned for “justice” since spending weeks in the besieged Palestinian territory treating the wounded at the start of the war.
Now in Lebanon, the plastic and reconstructive surgeon described seeing “kids, families whose houses have been targeted” with blast injuries in the past few weeks.
There were “kids with blast injuries to the face, to the torso, amputated limbs,” he said outside the American University of Beirut’s Medical Center.
Abu-Sittah estimated that more than a quarter of the wounded he had seen in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon were minors.
“I have a girl upstairs who is 13, who had a blast injury to the face, needed reconstruction of her jaw, will need several surgeries,” he said.
“Children who are injured in war need between eight and 12 surgeries by the time they’re adult age.”
According to the UN children’s agency UNICEF, 690 children in Lebanon have been wounded in recent weeks.
It said doctors had reported most suffered from “concussions and traumatic brain injuries from the impact of blasts, shrapnel wounds and limb injuries.”
“It’s just so reminiscent of what was happening in Gaza,” said Abu-Sittah.
“The heartbreaking thing is that this could all have been stopped if they stopped the war in Gaza,” he added.
Israeli strikes batter Beirut in heaviest bombardment so far
- Heavy strikes shake southern Beirut
- Israel says it made ‘targeted strikes’ on Hezbollah storage facilities, infrastructure
BEIRUT: Israeli air attacks battered Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight and early on Sunday, the most intense bombardment of the Lebanese capital since Israel sharply escalated its campaign against Iran-backed group Hezbollah last month.
During the night, the blasts sent booms across Beirut and sparked flashes of red and white for nearly 30 minutes visible from several kilometers away.
It was the single biggest attack of Israel’s assault on Beirut so far, witnesses and military analysts on local TV channels said.
On Sunday a grey haze hung over the city and rubble was strewn across streets in the southern suburbs, while smoke columns rose over the area.
“Last night was the most violence of all the previous nights. Buildings were shaking around us and at first I thought it was an earthquake. There were dozens of strikes — we couldn’t count them all — and the sounds were deafening,” said Hanan Abdullah, a resident of the Burj Al-Barajneh area in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Videos posted on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed fresh damage to the highway that runs from Beirut airport through its southern suburbs into downtown.
Israel said its air force had “conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities and terrorist infrastructure sites belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization in the area of Beirut.”
Lebanese authorities did not immediately say what the missiles had hit or what damage they caused.
This weekend’s intense bombardment came just ahead of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli figures.
The target of Israel’s airstrikes across Lebanon and its ground invasion in the south of the country is the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, Iran’s chief ally in the region. The assault has killed hundreds of people including civilians and has displaced 1.2 million, Lebanese officials say.
For days Israel has bombed the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh — considered a stronghold for Hezbollah but also home to thousands of ordinary Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian refugees — killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27.
A Lebanese security source said on Saturday that Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s potential successor, had been out of contact since Friday, after an Israeli airstrike on Thursday near the city’s international airport that was reported to have targeted him.
Israel continues to bomb the area of the strike, preventing rescue workers from reaching it, Lebanese security sources said.
Hezbollah has not commented on Safieddine.
His loss would be another blow to the group and its patron Iran. Israeli strikes across the region in the past year, sharply accelerated in recent weeks, have devastated Hezbollah’s leadership.
Gaza war
Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the Oct. 7 attacks and aimed at eliminating Hamas, another Iran-backed group, has killed nearly 42,000 people, Palestinian authorities say. The coastal enclave lies in ruins.
At least 26 people were killed and 93 others wounded when Israeli airstrikes hit a mosque and a school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip early on Sunday, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel a day after the Oct. 7 attacks and after Israel had begun bombing Gaza, saying it was acting in solidarity with the Palestinian group.
Cross-border fire continued between Israel and Hezbollah for months, but were mostly limited to the Israel-Lebanon border area before the recent upsurge.
Israel says it stepped up its assault on Hezbollah last month to enable the safe return of tens of thousands of citizens to homes in northern Israel, bombarded by the group since last Oct. 8.
Israeli authorities said on Saturday that nine Israeli soldiers had been killed in southern Lebanon so far.
In northern Israel, air raid sirens sounded on Sunday and the Israeli military said it had intercepted rockets fired from Lebanese territory.
Iran has signalled it does not want a direct war with Israel but has launched responses on occasion to Israeli attacks. It fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday that did little damage.
Israel has been weighing options for its response.
