الكاتب: kafej

A truce in the Israel-Hamas war appeared to be extending into a fifth day as the two sides completed their fourth release of captives from Gaza in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails under an original four-day truce deal while mediators said the process would continue.

Qatar, which along with Egypt has facilitated indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, said that there was an agreement to extend by two days the original four-day truce that was to expire on Monday.

“We have an extension … two more days,” Qatar’s Ambassador to the United Nations Alya Ahmed Saif Al-Thani told reporters after a closed-door UN Security Council meeting on Monday, saying both sides were to release more people.

“This is a very positive step,” Al-Thani said.

While the Israeli government had yet to officially confirm the truce extension by early on Tuesday morning, Israel’s Army Radio, citing the prime minister’s office, reported that a new list of captives – who are expected to be released later in the day – had been received.

Israel has said it would extend the ceasefire by one day for every 10 additional captives released by Hamas.

Local news website Axios reported the latest list contained the names of 10 Israeli captives. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli prime minister’s office.

Israel on Monday said 11 Israelis had been returned to the country from the Gaza Strip, bringing to 69 the total number of Israeli and foreign captives released by Hamas since Friday under the truce.

The Israel Prison Service said 33 Palestinian prisoners were also released on Monday from Israel’s Ofer prison in the West Bank and from a detention centre in Jerusalem, bringing the total number of Palestinians it has freed since Friday to 150.

The freed Palestinian prisoners were greeted by loud cheers as the Red Cross bus they were travelling in made its way through the streets of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

The original truce agreement also allowed more aid trucks into Gaza, where the civilian population faces shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicine.

While describing the extension of the truce as “a glimpse of hope and humanity”, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said two more days was not enough time to meet Gaza’s aid needs.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) said in a report on Monday that the four-day pause in hostilities had allowed humanitarian aid groups, particularly Red Crescent workers, to provide assistance to people in desperate need throughout Gaza where 1.8 million people are internally displaced.

More than 14,800 people have been killed in Gaza – including some 10,000 women and children – since Israel launched its attacks on the Palestinian enclave following Hamas’s October 7 raid on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people.

Israel’s intense bombing of the densely populated Gaza Strip has also resulted in 46,000 homes destroyed and more than 234,000 damaged –about 60 percent of the entire housing stock in Gaza, the UN said in the report.

Despite the apparent extension of the truce for two additional days, Israel remains committed to crushing Hamas militarily and has warned that its war on Gaza will resume.

Resumption will likely see Israeli forces expand their air, land and sea offensive from the devastated northern Gaza to the south of the enclave where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled seeking refuge.

“Hello, I’m Mohammed… of the family Kafarna. I am 24 years old and a law graduate from Al-Azhar University in Gaza. I live in the city of Beit Hanoon, adjacent to the apartheid wall that the Israeli occupation built. I lost 15 people from my family. I lost two friends, we grew up with each other too.”

For most young people, being 24 means entering the workforce, enrolling in grad school or moving cities.

But for Mohammed Kafarna, a Palestinian lawyer marooned in Egypt, 24 means watching helplessly as his family and friends in Gaza are slaughtered.

This is his story as told to Al Jazeera through conversations, messages and voice notes.

October 3 – Cairo, Egypt

At the beginning of October, Mohammed went to Egypt for eye surgery he could not get in Gaza. He was not travelling for pleasure, but wanted to make the most of his journey, writing on social media that he didn’t want to go home before seeing the “beautiful places in Egypt”.

Mohammed wears glasses so he can see. In photos with his university friend Amjad al-Athamneh – who has since been killed in a bombing – his laugh lines reach all the way to their rounded frames.

Mohammed was among hundreds of Palestinians who were in Egypt for medical treatment on October 7. So far, not one has made it back into Gaza.

October 4 – Cairo, Egypt

On October 4, Mohammed joked about taking photos of his travel buddies, saying his friends never took his picture.

“The worst thing in life,” he said playfully. Like many young people, he once delighted in sharing lighthearted pictures of himself on social media.

He could never have predicted the turn his life would take.

October 9 – Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza and Cairo, Egypt

On October 9, Mohammed’s cousin Suhail was transferring money for Mohammed’s surgery when an Israeli air attack targeted the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza.

Suhail was killed at the money exchange.

“We shared everything since childhood. I couldn’t bear the news. I went into shock for three days.”

Mohammed spiralled into a bottomless pit after Suhail’s death, whom he described as a brother. He could not pull himself out of bed.

Cut off from his family in Gaza, Mohammed had not had the surgery yet, and his ability to see took a backseat as he refused to have anyone else meet the same fate as Suhail to transfer money.

October 12 – Beit Hanoun, Gaza and Cairo, Egypt

On October 12, the house belonging to Maryam, Mohammed’s sister, was bombed in Beit Hanoon. Her husband Ali and his entire extended family were killed.

Maryam, who was flung 50 metres (164 feet) by the force of the explosion, and her two daughters survived.

One of Mohammed’s friends got a message to him from Gaza, breaking the news of his brother-in-law’s death. He reassured Mohammed that his sister and nieces were alive – for now.

“After their home was bombed, they were displaced to the south of the Gaza Strip and were targeted again,” said Mohammed, his voice hollow.

Maryam was able to receive several vital surgeries but some of the care she needs will have to wait “due to the lack of medicines and treatment in Gaza”. Her daughter Nihad suffered serious injuries and burns to her face while her daughter Sham’s left hand was fractured.

Hospitals in Gaza are so damaged and out of supplies that they cannot offer care. Several have shut down.

Stranded in Egypt, Mohammed was tormented by his sister and nieces’ suffering. Not only was he watching his family’s pain but he had to confront the possibility that he might become the only one left to remember them.

He wanted the rest of the world to know what hospitals have had to do in Gaza, that some operations were done without anaesthesia because there just isn’t any. So he went online to share atrocities being committed in Gaza.

“We do not want to die and be remembered as if we were just numbers. Each of us has a dream and a future that he was drawing in his imagination.”

His cousin Suhail’s dream was to raise enough money to build his own house.

October 23 – Cairo, Egypt

“Today I reached out to my mother. I wasn’t able to contact her for five days… she told me they drank the contaminated water.”

His mother cried from hunger on the phone call, and Mohammed felt utterly helpless. How could he keep his family from starving while stuck in Cairo? He appealed on social media for someone in Deir el-Balah to help his family.

“I just need someone to help me,” Mohammed pleaded. “[My family] need gas to be able to make bread…”

Israel’s siege on Gaza forced Palestinians there to ration food and drink noxious water, conditions that have worsened life in what rights groups have for years called an “open-air prison”.

Hopelessness threatened to overwhelm Mohammed. The world had turned its back on thousands of innocents.

“Israel is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing,” Mohammed said. “We must… stop this.”

October 25 – Southern Gaza Strip and Cairo, Egypt

On October 25, Ahmed Musa Shabat, another university friend of Mohammed’s, went to a bakery in southern Gaza hoping to buy bread for his family. They had just fled south from Beit Hanoon.

Victory Bakery fed the whole region, according to Mohammed, and he believes it was targeted, along with the people buying bread. Ahmed and his cousin were killed.

There were attacks even on the southern areas to where the Israeli army told civilians to flee. Those who headed south are still being slaughtered.

“Everything was one shock after another for me,” Mohammed disclosed with some difficulty. The number of deaths he was bombarded with over the past weeks had taken a toll on his mental state.

The same day Ahmed was killed, Mohammed heard that his cousin Muhammad and his young son Bassem had been killed in a bombing. Bassem was beheaded.

“His head is still under the rubble,” said Mohammed.

October 29 – Cairo, Egypt

Mohammed’s tone had grown weary.

Hours earlier, he heard news that his friend Ibrahim’s entire family had been killed. Ibrahim survived but is still in critical condition in an intensive care unit after a near-fatal head injury.

October 30 – Cairo, Egypt

Mohammed still hadn’t gotten the eye surgery but his thoughts were now entirely on his friend Ibrahim, who he still has hope for.

“Pray for Ibrahim,” Mohammed implored. “And let the world know that the massacres have not stopped.”

He wants to use his unforeseen position as a Palestinian in Egypt to raise awareness about the desperate situation in Gaza.

He appealed to the world to expose the human rights violations in Gaza, in Palestine.

“When will you take action to stop the massacres?” Mohammed challenged the international community.

“Your silence kills us more than their missiles.”

November 26 – Southern Gaza Strip and Cairo, Egypt

Mohammed made contact with his mother for the first time in 10 days.

When his family fled their home in early October, they did not know to bring clothes for the arduous month that lay ahead. His young nieces, he said, were shivering in the rain in the displacement camps.

Since he heard about the ceasefire, Mohammed has longed to see his mother and sister, but his mother warned him not to try to cross the border.

“You’d just be a burden on us here,” she told Mohammed. “There is no good water, no electricity, and no food.”

“She told me to stay out and try to find work so that I can help them after the end of this aggression because we’ve seen life after the war before.”

Mohammed recounted his family being without electricity for more than a year, carrying water by hand for more than 10km (6.2 miles) or sleeping in frigid homes without doors and windows.

In Cairo, Egyptian landlords are hostile towards him and many displaced Palestinians who struggle to pay rent, according to Mohammed. He managed to find housing after scouring social media but others were not as lucky.

Even if those in Gaza were able to send money to their relatives abroad, those who fled Israeli air raids have no income. When Mohammed’s family left the house, they brought no more than $150, which “ran out after the seventh day of the war”.

Mohammed sketched out an old dream of his – to complete his law studies at Cairo University, specialising in international humanitarian law.

“This is what I dreamed of since my childhood, to represent my country and my cause in international forums, and to convey to the world the correct narrative of the Palestinian issue.”

Palestinians, Mohammed said, love life and have dreams and ambitions. “They want to live in peace without fighting, killing, displacement.”

But after what he has experienced from afar in recent weeks, Mohammed is losing hope.

“I’ve been disappointed in my childhood dream,” he said.

“I have a feeling that my law degree will be torn up. Why do we study laws and rights if we cannot protect them?” He pleaded hopelessly.

“What is the benefit of adopting laws and agreements if we do not see their effectiveness in Gaza?”

“Do the children of Gaza not deserve security and peace like the rest of the world?”

‘Rat miners’ to drill through a narrow pipe to pull out workers trapped in the Himalayan tunnel after high-powered machines fail.

Rescuers in India are preparing to dig by hand to reach 41 workers trapped in a collapsed road tunnel for 16 days, a rescue operation hit by repeated setbacks.

Military engineers plan to use a so-called “rat-hole mining” technique, digging by hand to clear the rocks and rubble over the remaining 9 metres (29 feet), with temperatures plummeting in the remote mountain location in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.

The men, low-wage workers from India’s poorest states, have been stuck in the 4.5km (3 miles) tunnel in Uttarakhand state since it collapsed on November 12.

The men have been getting food, water, light, oxygen and medicines through a pipe but efforts to dig a tunnel have run into a series of snags with machines.

Attempts to drill a tunnel horizontally through the debris trapping the men have been plagued by damage to machinery, and rescuers will resort to drilling by hand, after clearing away the broken equipment inside the narrow evacuation pipe.

The drilling from inside the pipe, which is 900mm (3 feet) wide, will be done by a team of six “rat miners” from central India, who officials described as “skilled workers”.

Rat mining is a primitive, hazardous and controversial method used in India mostly to remove coal deposits through narrow passages. The name comes from its resemblance to rats burrowing through narrow holes.

“Three of us will go inside the tunnel, one will do the drilling the other will collect muck and the third one will push the muck through the trolley,” Rakesh Rajput, one of the miners, told the Reuters news agency.

“We have been doing it for more than 10 years and there’s enough space for us. The 41 men are also labourers and we all want to bring them out,” he said.

Government and private agencies involved in the rescue have been pursuing other options. On Sunday, they opened another route to the men, aiming to drill a shaft straight down from the top of the mountain above.

By Monday afternoon, they had drilled 31 metres (102 feet) of the 86 metres (282 feet), officials said, adding that the focus remains on the horizontal route.

“Skilled labourers will do the manual drilling,” said Harpal Singh, a former head of state-run Border Roads Organisation. “This is a sure-shot way of making progress.”

Bad weather could complicate the rescue. Thunderstorms, hail and lower temperatures with a minimum of 9 degrees Celsius (48.2 degrees Fahrenheit) are forecast in the mountains.

“They are trained in working in every situation so that’s not a worry for us,” said Mahmood Ahmad, managing director of the NHIDCL company, which is building the tunnel.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s principal secretary, or chief of staff, PK Mishra visited the site and spoke to the trapped men through a communication link. He told them that “everyone is making efforts to bring all of you out as early as possible”.

The tunnel is part of the Char Dham Highway, one of Modi’s most ambitious projects, aimed at connecting four Hindu pilgrimage sites through 890km (553 miles) of roads.

Authorities have not said what caused the cave-in which trapped the men as they were nearing the end of their night shift but the region is prone to landslides, earthquakes and floods.

Hundreds of thousands of people without power as fierce storm devastates infrastructure.

More than half a million people are without power in occupied-Crimea, Russia and Ukraine after a storm in the Black Sea region flooded roads, ripped up trees and took down power lines, according to Russian state media and Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy.

More than 2,000 towns and villages were without electricity on Sunday night and Monday morning in 16 Ukrainian regions, including Odesa, Mykolaiv and inland in Kyiv, as trees were uprooted, power lines snapped and electrical substations failed, leaving almost 150,000 households in the area without electricity, Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said.

A 110-metre (360ft) chimney of a heat and power plant collapsed in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa on Sunday night, adding to Ukraine’s losses of energy infrastructure that have already sustained heavy damage from Moscow’s military campaign targeting Ukraine’s power grid.

As winter nears, Russia has been attacking civilian infrastructure far from the front lines, leaving millions of Ukrainians without power, heat and water for days at a time.

Although the heating supply has been restored after plants in Odesa were shut down for several hours due to power fluctuations, Ukrainian officials said they expected the weather to worsen as forecasters predicted more strong winds and snowfall.

The head of Russia’s national meteorological service said the storm that hit Crimea was the most powerful since record-keeping began, state news agency RIA Novosti reported.

Storm deaths

At least three people were killed during the storm, local media reported.

One person was killed in the resort city of Sochi, another on the Russian-held Crimean Peninsula and a third person on board a vessel in the Kerch Strait, which separates Crimea from the Russian mainland, the state news agency TASS reported.

Russia’s Ministry of Energy said “about 1.9 million people” were affected by power cuts in the southern Russian regions of Dagestan, Krasnodar and Rostov as well as the occupied Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhia and Crimea.

Crimea’s Moscow-appointed governor declared a state of emergency, and hundreds of people were evacuated.

A video published online showed large waves sweeping over the seafront in Sochi and carrying away cars.

In the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, an aquarium flooded and nearly 800 exotic fish, including pikes and piranhas, died from thermal shock as cold seawater flooded the facility, the aquarium director said.

Roman Vilfand, the head of Russia’s national meteorological service, said a similar storm hit the region in November 1854 during the Crimean War. It caused at least 30 ships to sink off Crimea’s coast, RIA Novosti said.

In southern Russia, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium stopped crude oil loading at the Novorossiysk port on Monday due to “extremely unfavorable weather conditions”, including winds of up to 86 kilometres per hour (54 miles per hour) and waves up to 8 metres (26ft) high. In the port city of Anapa, a cargo ship ran aground.

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A mother recalls her son’s killing after Israeli forces raided their home and prevented an ambulance from reaching her son, who had been shot. Deadly raids in the occupied West Bank are ongoing despite a truce between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.