Region

PORT SUDAN, Sudan  — Large parts of war-torn Sudan are inaccessible to aid workers, a Red Cross official said on Wednesday as devastating fighting between the army and paramilitaries rages on.

“There are plenty of areas we cannot access, sometimes because they are very dangerous, and sometimes we do not receive permission,” said Pierre Dorbes, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“Improving access will help millions of people,” Dorbes told journalists in Port Sudan, the Red Sea city where the army, government and UN agencies are now based.

War has raged since April 2023 between the regular army under Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

The conflict has left tens of thousands dead and displaced more than 10 million people, according to the United Nations.

A recent UN-backed report said nearly 26 million people, or slightly more than half of the population, were facing high levels of “acute food insecurity”.

Volunteer groups in some areas consumed by the violence have set up communal kitchens, supported by international organisations.

“We provide about 2,000 meals a day, and this number is increasing daily,” Esmat Mohamed, who supervises one such initiative in the capital Khartoum, told AFP.

But international groups face logistical hurdles in transferring funds to volunteers on the ground, said one employee requesting anonymity for security reasons.

In the town of Dilling, near the South Sudan border, Kinda Komi is one of the volunteers providing meals to those in need.

“Since the start of the war, no food aid has reached the town, and the roads connecting it to the rest of the country have been cut due to the clashes,” she said.

According to her, “half of those in need leave without receiving meals.”

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AFP) — Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said on Wednesday his group would accept Palestinian ally Hamas's decision on Gaza truce negotiations, repeating that his movement would stop cross-border attacks on Israel if a ceasefire were reached.

Hizbollah has traded almost daily fire with Israeli forces in support of Hamas since the Palestinian resistance group's October 7 surprise attack on Israel triggered war in the Gaza Strip, stoking fears of a full-blown conflict.

"Hamas is negotiating... on behalf of the whole axis of resistance," Nasrallah said, referring to regional pro-Iran groups opposed to Israel and the United States.

"Whatever Hamas accepts, everyone accepts and is satisfied with," he said, adding: "We do not ask [Hamas] to coordinate with us because the battle in the first instance is theirs."

Nasrallah's remarks came days after he met with a Hamas delegation headed by foreign relations chief Khalil Al-Hayya, and as talks were to resume in Qatar towards a truce and hostage release deal in the Gaza war, now grinding into its 10th month.

Hamas has signalled that it would drop its insistence on a "complete" ceasefire — which Israel has repeatedly rejected — as a condition for starting truce talks.

Nasrallah repeated his position that "if a ceasefire is reached, and we all hope for that... our front will cease fire without any discussion".

"That is a commitment, because it is a support front and we have been clear [about this] from the start," he said, during a televised address commemorating a senior Hizbollah commander killed in an Israeli strike last week.

However, Nasrallah warned that “we will never allow any attack that the Israeli enemy might carry out against Lebanon [even] if there is a ceasefire in Gaza”.

Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said Sunday that “we will continue fighting and doing everything necessary to bring about the desired result” in the campaign against Hizbollah, “even if there is a ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip.

In Lebanon, the cross-border violence since October has killed nearly 500 people, mostly fighters but also including 95 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

On the Israeli side, at least 29 people have been killed, the majority of them soldiers, according to the authorities.

Nasrallah said Israeli demands to push Hizbollah back from the border “won’t fix” the situation for Israel.

His group’s launching of “hundreds of rockets and dozens of drones in a single day” towards Israeli targets was a message “that Hizbollah doesn’t fear war”, he added.

GENEVA — The United Nations on Tuesday said it remained extremely worried about the fate of UN and NGO staff seized by Yemen's Huthi rebels, urging their immediate release.

Last month the Iran-backed Houthis detained more than a dozen people from UN agencies and non-governmental organisations in what appeared to be a coordinated move.

"We remain extremely worried about the well-being of 13 UN staff and a number of NGO employees who have been detained for over a month now by the Ansar Allah de facto authorities in Yemen. We continue to be refused access to them," UN human rights office spokesman Jeremy Laurence told a media briefing in Geneva.

"We also remain particularly concerned by the situation of two other UN staff members who were already in prolonged detention — one since November 2021 and the other since August 2023."

The Houthis claimed they had arrested “an American-Israeli spy network” operating under the cover of humanitarian organisations.

“We emphatically reject the shocking allegations, publicly broadcast, levelled against our staff, and we urge the de facto authorities in Sanaa to immediately and unconditionally release them,” said Laurence.

“Our office calls on those states and entities with influence over Ansar Allah to use it to secure the safe and prompt release of all detained UN and NGO staff.

“We are also deeply worried about the conditions in which they are being held.”

He said it was crucial that the Houthis ensure that those detained are treated with full respect for their human rights, and be allowed to contact their families and legal representatives.

“Further targeting of human rights and humanitarian workers in Yemen must cease immediately,” he insisted.

The Houthis are engaged in a long-running civil war that has triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. More than half of the population is dependent on aid in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country.

The rebels seized control of the capital Sanaa in September 2014, prompting a Saudi-led military intervention on behalf of the government the following March.

They Houthis have kidnapped and tortured hundreds of civilians since the start of the conflict, according to

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — The authorities in Gaza said an Israeli strike on Saturday on a UN-run school where thousands of displaced were sheltering killed 16 people.

Israel's military said its aircraft had targeted "terrorists" operating around the Al Jawni school in Nuseirat, central Gaza.

The health ministry in the territory, which condemned the strike as an "odious massacre", said 50 injured were taken to hospital from the school.

Some 7,000 people were sheltering in the school at the time of the attack, the Hamas government press office said. Dozens of people scrambled through the rubble after the strike to find survivors.

The press office said the school was run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, and most of the casualties were "children, women, and elderly".

"This is the fourth time they have targeted the school without warning," said one woman, Samah Abu Amsha, who told how some children were killed as they read the Koran in a class when the missile hit.

"Shrapnel flew at me inside the classroom and the children were injured," she told AFP.

Hamas called the attack "a new massacre and crime committed by this criminal enemy as part of its war of genocide against our Palestinian people".

The Israeli military said in a statement it “struck several terrorists operating in structures located in the area of UNRWA’s Al-Jawni school”.

“This location served as a hideout and operational infrastructure from which attacks against IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip were directed and carried out,” it added, insisting that “steps were taken in order to mitigate the risk of harming civilians”.

‘No place is safe’ 

Israel has agreed to meetings with mediators on a ceasefire initiative but has kept up its offensive in the territory that started on October 7 after the Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel.

UNRWA said two of its workers were killed in a strike at Al Bureij, also in central Gaza, early Saturday. The agency has a major food warehouse in the district.

The Al Aqsa hospital said nine other bodies were brought to its morgue from the strike.

The UN agency said 194 of its workers have now been killed since the war started.

An UNRWA spokesperson said that since the war began, more than half of the agency’s facilities have been hit and many were shelters. “As a result at least 500 people sheltering in those facilities have been killed,” the spokesperson told AFP.

Paramedics said 10 people, including three journalists, died in another strike on a house in Nuseirat on Saturday.

“Absolutely no place in the Gaza Strip is safe,” said civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal.

The war began with the October 7 attack on southern Israel. In response, Israel has carried out a military offensive that has killed at least 38,098 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry there.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel said on Friday that "gaps" remained with Hamas on how to secure a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release but that it will send a delegation for fresh talks with Qatari mediators next week.

The statement from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesman came after a delegation led by the head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, David Barnea, held a first round of talks with mediators in Doha on Friday.

"It was agreed that next week Israeli negotiators will travel to Doha to continue the talks. There are still gaps between the parties," the spokesman said in a statement.

There has been no truce in the nine-month-old war in Gaza since a one-week pause in November saw 80 Israeli hostages freed in return for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The United States, which has worked alongside Qatar and Egypt in trying to broker a deal, had talked up the significance of Netanyahu's decision to send a delegation to Qatar.

The United States believes Israel and Hamas have a "pretty significant opening" to reach an agreement, a senior official said.

Israel's military offensive killed at least 38,011 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the territory.

US President Joe Biden announced a pathway to a truce deal in May that he said had been proposed by Israel. It included an initial six-week truce, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza population centres and the freeing of hostages by Palestinian fighters.

Talks subsequently stalled but the US official said on Thursday that the new proposal from Hamas “moves the process forward and may provide the basis for closing the deal”, though “significant work” remained.

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told AFP that new ideas from the group had been “conveyed by the mediators to the American side, which welcomed them and passed them on to the Israeli side. Now the ball is in the Israeli court”.

Hamdan blamed Israel for the deadlock since Biden’s announcement and said the Doha talks “will be a test for the US administration to see if it is willing to pressure the Zionist entity to accept these proposed ideas”.

The war has uprooted 90 percent of Gaza’s population, destroyed much of the territory’s housing and other infrastructure, and left almost 500,000 people enduring “catastrophic” hunger, UN agencies say.

The main stumbling block to a truce deal has been Hamas’s demand for a permanent end to the fighting, which Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners strongly reject.

The Israeli premier will probably meet with Biden during a scheduled visit to Washington to address Congress on July 24, the White House said.

Netanyhu has faced a well-organised protest movement in Israel demanding a deal to free the hostages, which took to the streets again on Thursday evening.

The veteran hawk demands the release of the hostages but also insists the war will not end until Israel has destroyed Hamas’s ability to make war or govern.

The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that “further disruption to health services is imminent in Gaza due to a severe lack of fuel”.

Only 90,000 litres of fuel entered Gaza on Wednesday, but the health sector alone needs 80,000 litres each day.

The WHO and its partners in Gaza were having “to make impossible choices” as a result, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A source close to Hizbollah said an Israeli drone strike targeted a vehicle in eastern Lebanon Saturday, killing an official from the Iran-backed group, with tensions high between the foes.

Hizbollah has traded near daily fire with the Israeli army across Lebanon's southern border since its Palestinian ally Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, triggering the war in Gaza.

"A local Hizbollah official" was killed in an "Israeli drone" strike on a vehicle near the eastern city of Baalbek, the source close to the group said, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

Lebanon's official National News Agency reported one person was killed when an "enemy drone" targeted a vehicle in the Shaat area, around 15 kilometres north of Baalbek.

The area is around 100 kilometres from Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.

Recent Israeli strikes in south Lebanon have killed two senior Hizbollah commanders — one of them this week — with the Shiite Muslim movement raining rockets on northern Israel in response.

The cross-border exchanges of fire have largely been restricted to the south Lebanon-north Israel border area, although Israel has repeatedly struck deep inside eastern Lebanon.

Hizbollah earlier Saturday claimed several attacks on Israeli positions near the southern border, including one with “explosive drones” that it said came in response to “Israeli enemy attacks” on south Lebanon villages.

Hizbollah says it is acting in support of Gazans and Hamas with its attacks, which began on October 8, with the escalating violence raising fears of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah, which last went to war in 2006.

The cross-border exchanges have killed at least 497 people in Lebanon, most of them fighters but also including 95 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

Israeli authorities say at least 16 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed on their side of the border.