Region

UNITED NATIONS, UNITED STATES — The United Nations joined the Lebanese government on Tuesday to appeal for an additional $371.4 million in humanitarian aid for people displaced by the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah.

The extension builds on an initial aid appeal for $426 million launched in October, as all-out war flared between the two sides and sent hundreds of thousands in Lebanon fleeing their homes.

That appeal raised approximately $250 million, according to the UN.

Following nearly a year of exchanges of cross-border fire initiated by Hezbollah over the war in Gaza, Israel in September stepped up its bombing campaign and later sent troops into Lebanon.

After two months of warring, in which Hizbollah’s influential chief Hassan Nasrallah and multiple other leaders were killed, a ceasefire deal was reached that went into effect in late November.

"While the cessation of hostilities offers hope, over 125,000 people remain displaced, and hundreds of thousands more face immense challenges rebuilding their lives," Imran Riza, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Lebanon, said in a statement Tuesday.

The additional funding "is urgently required to sustain life-saving efforts and prevent further deterioration of an already dire situation," he added.

The appeal is primarily aimed to assist an estimated one million Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian refugees affected by the conflict, funding a three-month period of emergency efforts through March 2025.

Since the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon began on November 27, more than 800,000 displaced people in Lebanon have been able to return home, according to UN figures.

ISTANBUL — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday said there was no place for "terrorist organisations" in Syria under its new Islamist leaders, in a warning regarding Kurdish forces there.

The fall of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad last month raised the prospect of Turkey intervening in the country against Kurdish forces accused by Ankara of links to armed separatists.

Erdogan's comment came during a meeting in Ankara with the prime minister of Iraq's Kurdish region, Masrour Barzani, the Turkish leader's office said in a statement.

Erdogan told Barzani that Turkey was working to prevent the ousting of Assad in neighbouring Syria from causing new instability in the region.

There is no place for "terrorist organisations or affiliated elements in the future of the new Syria," Erdogan said.

Ankara accuses one leading Kurdish force in Syria, the People's Protection Units [YPG], of links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party [PKK] in Turkey.

The PKK has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state and is banned as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and its Western allies.

The Turkish military regularly launches strikes against Kurdish fighters in Syria and neighbouring Iraq, accusing them of PKK links.

On Monday, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said: "The elimination of the PKK/YPG is only a matter of time."

He cited a call by Syria's new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose HTS group has long had ties with Turkey, for the Kurdish-led forces to be integrated into Syria's national army.

The United States has backed the YPG in its fight against the jihadist movement Islamic State [IS], which has been largely crushed in its former Syrian stronghold.

But Fidan warned that Western countries should not use the threat of IS as "a pretext to strengthen the PKK".

SEOUL — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken voiced confidence Monday that a ceasefire deal in Gaza would come together, but possibly after President Joe Biden leaves office on January 20.

Blinken, who tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully last year to broker a ceasefire in Gaza, said that the Biden administration "will work every minute of every day" until the end of its term to secure a hostage deal.

"We very much want to bring this over the finish line in the next two weeks," Blinken told reporters on a visit to Seoul.

"If we don't get it across the finish line in the next two weeks, I'm confident that it will get its completion at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later," Blinken said.

"When it does, it will be on the basis of the plan that President Biden put forward and that virtually the entire world supports."

President-elect Donald Trump, who takes over on January 20, has vowed even stronger support for Israel and has warned Hamas of "hell to pay" if it does not free hostages seized in the October 7, 2023 attack.

A Hamas official said Sunday the group was ready to free 34 hostages in the "first phase" of a potential deal with Israel, which said that indirect talks had resumed in Qatar.

Blinken said there had been an "intensified engagement" by Hamas on reaching a deal, but that it was not yet complete.

"We need Hamas to make the final necessary decisions to complete the agreement and to fundamentally change the circumstance for the hostages, getting them out, for people in Gaza, bringing them relief, and for the region as a whole, creating an opportunity to actually move forward to something better," Blinken said.

Gunmen opened fire Monday on a bus and other vehicles near a village in the occupied West Bank, killing three people and wounding seven, the Israeli occupation authorities said.

The military told AFP that all three of the dead held Israeli citizenship, and said troops were "pursuing the terrorists" who carried out the attack near the village of Al Funduq.

Since the Gaza war began, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 818 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Ramallah-based health ministry.

Palestinian attacks on Israelis have also killed at least 25 people in the West Bank in the same period, according to Israeli official figures.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — Israel pounded the Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing at least 23 people according to rescuers, nearly 15 months into its war of aggression against the Palestinian territory.

The latest deaths come after Israel late on Saturday said indirect negotiations had resumed in Qatar for a truce and hostage release deal.

An air strike on a house in northern Gaza's Sheikh Radwan area killed at least 11 people early Sunday, according to Civil Defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal. He said the victims included women and children.

"Rescuers are still searching for five people trapped under the rubble of the house," he said, adding his crew members were using "bare hands" in the effort.

The Israeli military said Sunday it had struck more than 100 "terror targets" in Gaza over the past two days, marking an apparent escalation in its assault.

Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry said a total of 88 people were killed over the previous 24 hours.

In one strike, five people died when the house of the Abu Jarbou family was struck in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, rescuers said.

AFP footage from another strike showed rescuers transporting bodies and injured people to a hospital.

In one scene, a medic attempted to resuscitate a wounded man inside an ambulance, while another carried an injured child to the hospital.

Relatives cried over the bodies of two men wrapped in white shrouds, the images showed.


Warning to Hizbollah

Israel's military offensive has killed 45,805 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry, which the United Nations finds reliable.

In a related development, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz threatened Lebanon's Iran-backed Hizbollah movement, accusing it of violating ceasefire terms that halted their war on November 27.

He stated that Hizbollah had still not withdrawn "beyond the Litani River" in southern Lebanon, as stipulated in the ceasefire deal.

"If this condition is not met, there will be no agreement and Israel will be forced to act on its own to ensure the safe return of residents of the north to their homes," Katz said.

On Saturday, Hizbollah chief Naim Qassem accused Israel of violating the ceasefire agreement, which the United States and France help to monitor. Qassem said Hezbollah was prepared to respond even before the expiry of a 60-day deadline for Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon.

Almost two weeks ago, UN peacekeepers and Lebanon's prime minister called on Israel's army to speed up its withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

SYRIA — A Syria war monitor said explosions on Sunday rocked an area near Damascus housing weapons depots used by the toppled government of Bashar Al Assad.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said the blasts in the Kisweh area, south of the Syrian capital, may be the result of an Israeli air strike.

The Israeli military, which has struck many military sites in Syria since Assad's fall, told AFP in Jerusalem it did not attack the site.

The Britain-based Observatory, which has a network of sources in Syria, said that "loud blasts resonated in the wider capital area".

The explosions occurred "at ammunition depots of the former regime forces... near the town of Kisweh", sending a thick cloud of smoke billowing over the site, the Observatory said.

An AFP video journalist saw small fires burning in the blackened rubble of a flattened building on the outskirts of the town of Kisweh. Several other one-storey buildings stood undamaged nearby.

The explosions continued into Sunday evening, ringing out across surrounding areas, the journalist said.

Israel, which rarely comments on its actions in neighbouring Syria, has carried out hundreds of air strikes on military sites since Islamist-led forces ousted Assad and seized Damascus last month.

Israel has said it was seeking to prevent weapons from falling into hostile hands.

Most recently, the Observatory said Israeli war planes hit sites of the now defunct Syrian army in the Aleppo area on Friday.

In late December, the Observatory said 11 people died in an explosion at an arms storage facility in the Adra area northeast of Damascus, adding that it was possibly the result of an Israeli strike. Israel denied any involvement.

DAMASCUS — Determining the fate of those who went missing during Syria's civil war will be a massive task likely to take years, the president of the International Committee for the Red Cross said.

"Identifying the missing and informing the families about their fate is going to be a huge challenge," ICRC president Mirjana Spoljaric told AFP in an interview.

The fate of tens of thousands of detainees and missing people remains one of the most harrowing legacies of the conflict that started in 2011 when president Bashar al-Assad's forces brutally repressed anti-government protests.

Many are believed to have been buried in mass graves after being tortured in Syria's jails during a war that has killed more than half a million people.

Thousands have been released since Islamist-led rebels ousted Assad last month, but many Syrians are still looking for traces of relatives and friends who went missing.

Spoljaric said the ICRC was working with the caretaker authorities, non-governmental organisations and the Syrian Red Crescent to collect data to give families answers as soon as possible.

But "the task is enormous," she said in the interview late Saturday.

"It will take years to get clarity and to be able to inform everybody concerned. And there will be cases we will never (be able) to identify," she added.

"Until recently, we've been following up on 35,000 cases, and since we established a new hotline in December, we are adding another 8,000 requests," Spoljaric said.

"But that is just potentially a portion of the numbers."

Spoljaric said the ICRC was offering the new authorities to "work with us to build the necessary institution and institutional capacities to manage the available data and to protect and gather what... needs to be collected".

Human Rights Watch last month urged the new Syrian authorities to "secure, collect and safeguard evidence, including from mass grave sites and government records... that will be vital in future criminal trials".

The rights group also called for cooperation with the ICRC, which could "provide critical expertise" to help safeguard the records and clarify the fate of missing people.

Spoljaric said: "We cannot exclude that data is going to be lost. But we need to work quickly to preserve what exists and to store it centrally to be able to follow up on the individual cases."

More than half a century of brutal rule by the Assad family came to a sudden end in early December after a rapid rebel offensive swept across Syria and took the capital Damascus.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, says more than 100,000 people have died in detention from torture or dire health conditions across Syria since 2011.

GAZA Strip, Palestinian Territories — Rescuers in Gaza said on Saturday that Israeli strikes across the Palestinian territory killed at least 26 people, the day after Hamas said peace talks were to resume.

The civil defence agency said a dawn air strike on the home of the Al Ghoula family in Gaza City killed 11 people, seven of them children.

AFP images from the Gaza City area neighbourhood of Shujaiya showed residents combing through smoking rubble. Bodies including those of small children were lined up on the ground, shrouded in white sheets.

Late on Friday Hamas had said indirect negotiations with Israel were to resume in Qatar that same night for a truce and hostage release deal. There has since been no update.

Hamas said talks would "focus on ensuring the agreement leads to a complete cessation of hostilities [and] the withdrawal of occupation forces".

Mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States have been engaged in months of effort that have failed to end nearly 15 months of war.

A key obstacle to a deal has been Israel's reluctance to agree to a lasting ceasefire.

On Thursday, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said he had authorised Israeli negotiators to continue talks in Doha.

In December, Qatar expressed optimism that "momentum" was returning to the talks following the US election of Donald Trump, who takes office in 16 days.

But Hamas and Israel then accused each other of setting new conditions and obstacles.

On January 1, Israeli defence minister Israel Katz warned of even more intense retaliatory strikes if rocket fire continued from Gaza and militants did not release hostages they still hold.

Such rocket launches had become rare but have intensified since late December as Israel presses a three-month offensive in the north of the territory.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said the Ghoula home in Gaza City "was completely destroyed".

"It was a two-storey building and several people are still under the rubble," he said, adding Israeli drones had "also fired on ambulance staff".

Contacted by AFP, the Israeli army did not immediately comment on the strike.

 'Everything was shaking'

"A huge explosion woke us up. Everything was shaking," said neighbour Ahmed Mussa.

"It was home to children, women. There wasn't anyone wanted or who posed a threat."

Elsewhere, the civil defence agency said an Israeli strike killed five security officers tasked with accompanying aid convoys as they drove through the southern city of Khan Yunis.

Bassal accused Israel of having "deliberately targeted" them to "affect the humanitarian supply chain and increase the suffering" of the population.

The army has not yet responded to the accusation.

United Nations rights experts said on Monday that the north Gaza "siege" appears to be part of an effort "to permanently displace the local population as a precursor to Gaza's annexation".

Rescuers said strikes elsewhere in Gaza killed 10 other people, including a child and two other members of the same family, when their house was bombed in Khan Yunis.

AFP images showed Palestine Red Crescent paramedics in Gaza City moving the body of one of their colleagues, his green jacket laid over the blanket that covered his corpse.

The health ministry in Gaza said a total of 136 people had been killed over the previous 48 hours.

Israel's military campaign has killed at least 45,717 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — The Palestinian Authority has ordered the suspension of broadcasts by Qatar-based Al Jazeera and on Thursday accused it of incitement, which the news channel compared to Israeli practices.

Al Jazeera is already banned from broadcasting from Israel amid a long-running feud with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government.

In September, armed and masked Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah also raided the Al Jazeera office, saying it was "used to incite terror".

The military issued an initial 45-day closure order, prompting the Palestinian foreign ministry at the time to condemn "a flagrant violation" of press freedom.

On Thursday, the PA insisted its own suspension measure was "temporary", adding its decision followed a complaint from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate concerning the network's coverage.

"These measures shall be applied until Al Jazeera chooses to act in accordance with basic media ethics, including its duty to prevent deliberate disinformation, ban the glorification of violence, and end the incitement to armed mutiny," the PA said.

The syndicate, which represents about 3,000 Palestinian journalists, said several had filed complaints against Al Jazeera for "biased media coverage on its platforms, including incitement, misleading reports, and content that stirs internal discord".

The PA's decision includes "temporarily freezing the work of all journalists, employees, crews and affiliated channels until their legal status is rectified due to Al Jazeera's violations of the laws and regulations in force in Palestine", the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported late Wednesday.

The channel aired images of what appeared to be Palestinian security officers entering the network's office in Ramallah and handing over the suspension orders.

Al Jazeera condemned the decision, saying it "aligns with Israeli occupation practices targeting its media teams".

It accused the PA, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank, of "attempting to deter Al Jazeera from covering escalating events in the occupied Palestinian territories" including in Jenin and its refugee camp.

The PA's security forces have been engaged in weeks of deadly clashes with armed militants in Jenin, in the northern West Bank.

Tensions over coverage 

Hamas, rivals of Fateh which dominates the PA, condemned the decision to ban the network.

"This decision aligns with a series of recent arbitrary actions taken by the Authority to curtail public rights and freedoms, and to reinforce its security grip on the Palestinian people," Hamas said in a statement.

"We call on the Palestinian Authority to immediately reverse this decision ... It is crucial to ensure the continuation of media coverage that exposes the occupation and supports the steadfastness of our people."

Islamic Jihad, allied with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, also criticised the decision.

"We condemn the authority's decision to close Al Jazeera's office in Palestine when our people and our cause are in dire need to convey their suffering to the world," the group said in a statement.

Tensions between the network and the Fateh movement of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas have risen in recent weeks following the channel's coverage of the clashes in Jenin.

In late December, the channel condemned what it said was an "incitement campaign" by Fateh against the network in some areas of the occupied West Bank.

"This campaign follows the network's coverage of clashes between Palestinian security forces and resistance fighters in Jenin," it said in a statement at the time.

The security forces of the PA have been engaged in deadly clashes with gunmen since early December, triggered by the arrests of several fighters.

They are fighting members of the Jenin Battalion, most of whom are affiliated with either Islamic Jihad or Hamas, whose October 7, 2023 attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war.

Fateh's rivals have accused PA forces of aiding Israel.

Al Jazeera continues to work in Gaza, where Hamas seized control in 2007.

The violence in Jenin refugee camp, a stronghold of armed groups and a frequent target of Israeli military raids, has killed 11 people including PA security personnel, militants and civilians.