Aoun urges UNHCR chief to organize the return of Syrian refugees

Filippo Grandi and Joseph Aoun. (X/@FilippoGrandi)
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Updated 23 January 2025
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Aoun urges UNHCR chief to organize the return of Syrian refugees

  • Joseph Aoun said that Lebanon ‘wants the return of Syrian refugees to their country as soon as possible, especially since the reasons for their displacement no longer exist’
  • Filippo Grandi: Return of refugees ‘must be accompanied by financial support and respect for rights to prevent displacement again’

BEIRUT: Lebanese President Joseph Aoun called on the UNHCR’s commissioner, Filippo Grandi, to “start organizing return convoys for the displaced Syrians in Lebanon.”

Aoun said Lebanon “can no longer support the burden resulting from their presence at different levels.”

He called on the international community to provide material and humanitarian support to achieve the return of displaced Syrians.

Some countries have already started their support, he added.

Grandi visited Aoun at the Presidential Palace to congratulate him on his election.

During the meeting, the president affirmed that Lebanon “wants the return of Syrian refugees to their country as soon as possible, especially since the reasons for their displacement no longer exist.”

Aoun, who also met with Prime Minister-designate Nawaf Salam, tackled the infiltration of several Syrians into Lebanon following the developments in the neighboring country.

He emphasized “the importance of working to stop infiltration on both sides of the Lebanese-Syrian border.”

Citing UNHCR estimations, Grandi said that more than 200,000 displaced Syrians had returned to their country from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and other countries since the fall of the former Syrian regime on Dec. 8.

Many others also wish to return home, he added.

He added that a survey conducted by the UNHCR showed that the number of those wishing to return had increased from about 1 percent to 30 percent in a matter of weeks.

Grandi affirmed that the UNHCR was “supporting those who returned and that we have already started doing so.”

He said the UNHCR’s relationship with the new authorities across Syria was constructive, and they had started prioritizing the issue.

Grandi said UNHCR wanted to work with Lebanon to build a practical way to support the return of Syrians.

To achieve this, the president can play a vital role with the international community, he added. 

After the meeting Grandi explained that his visits to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkiye aim to “discuss the issue of Syrian refugees, particularly in light of recent political changes in Syria.

“We believe that these changes may allow refugees to return to their home country and leave their host nations, including Lebanon, which has hosted them with great generosity and patience for nearly 14 years.”

He added: “During the most recent war in Lebanon, between September and October, over 450,000 Syrian refugees returned to Syria.

“We believe that, with the return of this significant number of Syrian refugees, sustained support is crucial to ensure their permanent return.

“Therefore, we began implementing a program designed to support returnees from different countries by offering material assistance and other means of support.

“Material support is essential, as well as efforts to restore life in the areas where refugees are resettling,” he said.

“Otherwise, they will leave again, most probably to their host countries.

“It is important to note that the new Syrian authorities have welcomed the Syrian refugees back, which is a positive sign,” Grandi said.

“However, the new authorities must stay on course — respecting minorities, preserving the rights of all citizens, and lifting Syria to new horizons that rebuild trust among Syrians, including returning refugees,” he added.

Grandi held talks as Lebanese military authorities prepared for the withdrawal of Israeli forces following their incursion into southern Lebanon since Oct. 1. The 60-day stage of the ceasefire deal is set to expire at dawn on Sunday.

In a meeting with acting Lebanese Army Commander Maj.-Gen. Hassan Odeh, caretaker Defense Minister Maurice Slim underlined Lebanon’s “firm commitment to the withdrawal of the Israeli forces within the agreed deadline in the ceasefire agreement.”

Slim’s office stated that the discussion focused on the deployment of the Lebanese Army in all the areas from which the Israeli forces would withdraw.

Slim said the army was ready to be deployed in throughout the region.

The Lebanese Army entered the border town of Kafr Shuba in the eastern sector.

Units had been stationed on the outskirts of the town, facing Al-Sammaqa, an Israeli military site.

Other units have been deployed in Hanin, where Civil Defense teams recovered the bodies of several Hezbollah fighters.

Also on Thursday, the Israeli military destroyed rest facilities on the banks of the Wazzani River, and eight houses in the town of Taybeh were deliberately burned.

Video footage was taken by dozens of residents returning to their villages after the Lebanese Army deployed there, showing the extent of the destruction of property and facilities, especially in the town of Khiyam.

The Israeli military claimed that “forces of the 810th Brigade, operating under the command of the 210th Division, found and seized a large number of weapons in the Shebaa Farms, including anti-tank launchers, rocket launchers, machine guns, binoculars, and rockets aimed at Israeli territory.”

In a statement, the Israeli military said that “the forces of the 7th Brigade, operating under the command of the 91st Division, are continuing their activities in southern Lebanon to protect Israel's security.”

It claimed that “they are operating under the understandings reached between Israel and Lebanon while maintaining compliance with the conditions of the ceasefire agreement.”

Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US, Michael Herzog, claimed that talks were being held with the administration of President Donald Trump to extend the withdrawal date from Lebanon scheduled for next Sunday.

The Trump administration is pressuring Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in accordance with the scheduled date on Sunday, the Israeli Army Radio reported.


Palestinian behind Oscar-winning documentary arrested by Israeli army — co-director

Updated 25 March 2025
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Palestinian behind Oscar-winning documentary arrested by Israeli army — co-director

  • Dozens of settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Susiya in the Masafer Yatta area, destroying property
  • They attacked Hamdan Ballal, one of the documentary’s co-directors, leaving his head bleeding, the activists said

JERUSALEM: Israeli settlers beat up one of the Palestinian co-directors of the Oscar-winning documentary film “No Other Land” on Monday in the occupied West Bank before he was detained by the Israeli military, according to two of his fellow directors and other witnesses.
The filmmaker Hamdan Ballal was one of three Palestinians detained in the village of Susiya, according to attorney Leah Tsemmel. Police told her they’re being held at a military base for medical treatment and she said she hasn’t been able to speak with them.
Basel Adra, another co-director, witnessed the detention and said around two dozen settlers — some masked, some carrying guns, some in Israeli uniform — attacked the village. Soldiers who arrived pointed their guns at the Palestinians, while settlers continued throwing stones.
“We came back from the Oscars and every day since there is an attack on us,” Adra told The Associated Press. “This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like a punishment.”
The Israeli military said it detained three Palestinians suspected of hurling rocks at forces and one Israeli civilian involved in a “violent confrontation” between Israelis and Palestinians — a claim witnesses interviewed by the AP disputed. The military said it had transferred them to Israeli police for questioning and had evacuated an Israeli citizen from the area to receive medical treatment.
“No Other Land,” which won the Oscar this year for best documentary, chronicles the struggle by residents of the Masafer Yatta area to stop the Israeli military from demolishing their villages. Ballal and Adra, both from Masafar Yatta, made the joint Palestinian-Israeli production with Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
The film has won a string of international awards, starting at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024. It has also drawn ire in Israel and abroad, as when Miami Beach proposed ending the lease of a movie theater that screened the documentary.
Adra said that settlers entered the village Monday evening shortly after residents broke the daily fast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. A settler — who according to Adra frequently attacks the village — walked over to Ballal’s home with the military, and soldiers shot in the air. Ballal’s wife heard her husband being beaten outside and scream “I’m dying,” according to Adra.
Adra then saw the soldiers lead Ballal, handcuffed and blindfolded, from his home into a military vehicle. Speaking to the AP by phone, he said Ballal’s blood was still splattered on the ground outside his own front door.
Some of the details of Adra’s account were backed up by another eyewitness, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
A group of 10-20 masked settlers with stones and sticks also assaulted activists with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, smashing their car windows and slashing tires to make them flee the area, one of the activists at the scene, Josh Kimelman, told the AP.
Video provided by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence showed a masked settler shoving and swinging his fists at two activists in a dusty field at night. The activists rush back to their car as rocks can be heard thudding against the vehicle.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians want all three for their future state and view settlement growth as a major obstacle to a two-state solution.
Israel has built well over 100 settlements, home to over 500,000 settlers who have Israeli citizenship. The 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under seemingly open-ended Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority administering population centers.
The Israeli military designated Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank as a live-fire training zone in the 1980s and ordered residents, mostly Arab Bedouin, to be expelled. Around 1,000 residents have largely remained in place, but soldiers regularly move in to demolish homes, tents, water tanks and olive orchards — and Palestinians fear outright expulsion could come at any time.
During the war in Gaza, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank during wide-scale military operations, and there has also been a rise in settler attacks on Palestinians. There has been a surge in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.


South Sudan is teetering on the edge of renewed civil war, UN envoy says

Updated 25 March 2025
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South Sudan is teetering on the edge of renewed civil war, UN envoy says

  • The country slid into a civil war in December 2013 largely based on ethnic divisions
  • More than 400,000 people were killed in the war, which ended with a 2018 peace agreement
  • The latest tensions stem from fighting in the country’s north between government troops and a rebel militia, known as the White Army

UNITED NATIONS: South Sudan is teetering on the edge of renewed civil war, the top UN official in the world’s youngest nation warned on Monday, lamenting the government’s sudden postponement of the latest peace effort.
Calling the situation unfolding in the country “dire,” Nicholas Haysom said international efforts to broker a peaceful solution can only succeed if President Salva Kiir and his rival-turned-vice president, Riek Machar, are willing to engage “and put the interests of their people ahead of their own.”
There were high hopes when oil-rich South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 after a long conflict. But the country slid into a civil war in December 2013 largely based on ethnic divisions when forces loyal to Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, battled those loyal to Machar, an ethnic Nuer.
More than 400,000 people were killed in the war, which ended with a 2018 peace agreement that brought Kiir and Machar together in a government of national unity. Under the agreement, elections were supposed to be held in February 2023, but they were postponed until December 2024 — and again until 2026.
The latest tensions stem from fighting in the country’s north between government troops and a rebel militia, known as the White Army, which is widely believed to be allied with Machar.
Earlier this month, a South Sudanese general was among several people killed when a United Nations helicopter on a mission to evacuate government troops from the town of Nasir, the scene of the fighting in Upper Nile state, came under fire. Days earlier on March 4, the White Army overran the military garrison in Nasir and government troops responded by surrounding Machar’s home in the capital, Juba, and arresting several of his key allies.
Haysom said tensions and violence were escalating “particularly as we grow closer to elections and as political competition increases, sharpens between the principal players.”
He said Kiir and Machar don’t trust each other enough to display the leadership needed to implement the 2018 peace deal and move to a future that would see a stable and democratic South Sudan.
“Rampant misinformation, disinformation and hate speech is also ratcheting up tensions and driving ethnic divisions, and fear,” Haysom said.
“Given this grim situation,” he said, “we are left with no other conclusion but to assess that South Sudan is teetering on the edge of a relapse into civil war.”
Haysom, who heads the nearly 18,000-member UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, warned that a relapse into open war would lead to the same horrors that ravaged the country, especially in 2013 and 2016.
He said the UN takes the threat of the “ethnic transformation” of the conflict very seriously.
To try to prevent a new civil war, the UN special envoy said the peacekeeping mission is engaging in intense shuttle diplomacy with international and regional partners, including the African Union.
Haysom said the collective message of the regional and international community is for Kiir and Machar to meet to resolve their differences, return to the 2018 peace deal, adhere to the ceasefire, release detained officials and resolve tensions “through dialogue rather than military confrontation.”


Israeli strikes on Gaza killed 23 people overnight

Updated 25 March 2025
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Israeli strikes on Gaza killed 23 people overnight

  • The dead include three children and their parents, who were killed in a strike on their tent near the southern city of Khan Younis

Palestinian medics said Israeli strikes killed at least 23 people in the Gaza Strip overnight into Tuesday.
The dead include three children and their parents, who were killed in a strike on their tent near the southern city of Khan Younis, according to Nasser Hospital, which has received a flood of dead and wounded since Israel resumed heavy bombardment of Gaza last week, shattering the ceasefire that had halted the 17-month war.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 113,000, according to the Health Ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants. Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence.
Israel launched the campaign vowing to destroy Hamas after its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, in which militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted 251. Israel says it only targets militants and blames Hamas for civilian deaths because it operates in densely populated areas.


Israel strikes Syria bases again despite EU warning

Updated 25 March 2025
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Israel strikes Syria bases again despite EU warning

  • Israeli shelling kills five in Syrian province of Daraa
  • Israel said Friday it struck the same bases after a war monitor first reported the raids

JERUSALEM: At least five people were killed Tuesday in Israeli shelling of the southern Syrian province of Daraa, said local authorities, who also reported an Israeli incursion.
Provincial authorities, in a statement posted on Telegram, reported a provisional toll of “five people killed in the Israeli bombardment of the town of Kuwayya... west of Daraa,” adding that residents had fled Israeli tank shelling.

The Israeli army had again struck two military bases in central Syria, a day after the European Union’s foreign policy chief warned strikes there and in Lebanon risked escalation.
“A short while ago, the IDF struck military capabilities that remained at the Syrian military bases of Tadmur and T4,” the Israeli military said, referring to bases in Palmyra and another 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of the city.
“The IDF will continue to act in order to remove any threat posed to the citizens of the State of Israel,” it added.
Israel said Friday it struck the same bases after a war monitor first reported the raids.
On Monday during a visit to Jersalem, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas warned that Israeli strikes on Syria and Lebanon were threatening to worsen the situation.
“Military actions must be proportionate, and Israeli strikes into Syria and Lebanon risk further escalation,” Kallas said at a joint news conference with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
“We feel that these things are unnecessary because Syria is right now not attacking Israel and that feeds more radicalization that is also against Israel,” Kallas told journalists.
In Syria, Israel has launched hundreds of strikes on military sites since Islamist-led rebels overthrew Bashar Assad in December.
Israel says it wants to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of new authorities it considers militants.
And despite a ceasefire, Israel has continued to carry out strikes on Lebanon — with both sides repeatedly accusing the other of violating the truce.
Israel launched air strikes on southern Lebanon on Saturday, killing eight people, in response to rocket fire that hit its territory for the first time since a ceasefire took effect on November 27.
No party has claimed responsibility for the rocket fire.
The Israeli military has also deployed to the UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded the demilitarization of southern Syria.
Syria’s foreign ministry has accused Israel of waging a campaign against “the stability of the country.”
When asked about Israel’s stance toward Syria’s new leaders, Kallas said: “Of course our worries are the same. They say the right things, will they do the right things?”
“But we have discussed this in the European Union and among all the member states, and our view is that we need a stable Syria,” she added.


US airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthis kill at least 2 people, group says

People look at the site of a U.S. strike in Sanaa, Yemen March 24, 2025. (REUTERS)
Updated 25 March 2025
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US airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthis kill at least 2 people, group says

  • The American strikes on the militia, who threaten maritime trade and Israel, entered their 10th day without any sign of stopping

DUBAI: US airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi militia pounded sites across the country into early Tuesday, with the group saying one attack in the capital killed at least two people and wounded more than a dozen others.

The American strikes on the militia, who threaten maritime trade and Israel, entered their 10th day without any sign of stopping. They are part of a campaign by US President Donald Trump targeting the rebel group while also trying to pressure Iran, the Houthis’ main benefactor.

So far, the US has not offered any specifics on the sites it is striking, though Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz claimed the attacks have “taken out key Houthi leadership, including their head missileer.” That’s something so far that’s not been acknowledged by the Houthis, though the militia have downplayed their losses in the past and exaggerated their attacks attempting to target American warships.

“We’ve hit their headquarters,” Waltz told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “We’ve hit communications nodes, weapons factories and even some of their over-the-water drone production facilities.”

An apparent US strike Sunday hit a building in a western neighborhood of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, killing at least two people and wounding 13 others, the rebel-controlled SABA news agency said, citing health officials. Footage released by the militia showed the rubble of a collapsed building and pools of blood staining the gray dust covering the ground.

A building next to the collapsed structure still stood, suggesting American forces likely used a lower-yield warhead in the strike.

The Houthis also described American airstrikes targeting sites around the city of Saada, a Houthi stronghold, the Red Sea port city of Hodeida and Marib province, home to oil and gas fields still under the control of allies to Yemen’s exiled central government. Those strikes continued into early Tuesday as the Houthis separately launched a missile attack on Israel.

The campaign of airstrikes targeting the militia, which killed at least 53 people immediately after they began March 15, started after the Houthis threatened to begin targeting “Israeli” ships again over Israel blocking aid entering the Gaza Strip. The militia in the past have had a loose definition of what constitutes an Israeli ship, meaning other vessels could be targeted as well.

The Houthis had targeted over 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two vessels and killing four sailors during their campaign targeting ships from November 2023 until January of this year. They also launched attacks targeting American warships, though none have been hit so far.

The attacks greatly raised the Houthis’ profile as they faced economic problems and launched a crackdown targeting any dissent and aid workers at home amid Yemen’s decadelong stalemated war that has torn apart the Arab world’s poorest nation.