التصنيف: estaql

The Pentagon has said that the attempted hijacking was likely the work of Somali pirates rather than Houthi fighters.

The United States has said that a group of attackers who tried to seize an Israel-linked cargo ship over the weekend were probably Somali pirates rather than Houthi fighters from nearby Yemen.

Speaking on Monday, Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder noted that the US has not ruled out a Houthi connection to the attempted hijacking by five armed men over the weekend.

“We’re continuing to assess, but initial indications that these five individuals are Somali,” said Ryder.

“Clearly a piracy-related incident,” he added.

US Navy forces thwarted the capture of the tanker Central Park over the weekend after it was boarded by armed men, who were captured after the US warship Mason arrived on the scene.

The attempted hijacking comes at a time when Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have carried out a series of raids on ships in the region, and the US said ballistic missiles were fired from Houthi-controlled territory in the direction of US ships shortly after the attack.

The Houthis have consolidated control over large swathes of northern Yemen and emerged as a growing force in the region after a yearslong war with the country’s government and a coalition of forces from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

While fighting in Yemen has become more subdued over the last year, the Houthis have launched several attacks on Israel amid ongoing fighting between Israel and the Palestinian armed group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Missile and drone attacks launched towards Israel have largely failed, but the group has seized commercial ships in the Red Sea that they say have connections to Israel.

Following one such seizure earlier this month, the US said that it was considering redesignating the Houthis as a “terrorist” organisation.

The Pentagon has said that the ballistic missiles fired over the weekend were launched in the general direction of the US ships, but that they fell into the ocean about 19km (10 nautical miles) away from the vessels and did not result in any injuries.

Yemen’s government in Aden placed blame on the Houthis for the attack, but the group did not acknowledge either the missile launch or the attempted vessel seizure.

The Central Park is managed by Zodiac Maritime Ltd, a London-headquartered international ship management firm, owned by Israel’s Ofer family.

A humanitarian pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas will extend by two days, mediator Qatar and Hamas have said, hours before an initial four-day truce in Gaza was set to expire.

“The State of Qatar announces that, as part of the ongoing mediation, an agreement has been reached to extend the humanitarian truce for an additional two days in the Gaza Strip,” Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Majed Al-Ansari said on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday.

Qatar, the United States and Egypt have engaged in intense negotiations to establish and prolong the truce in Gaza, which mediators had said was designed to be broadened and expanded.

Over the course of the initial truce, a total 50 civilian hostages, all women and children, were expected to be freed by Hamas.

In exchange, 150 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel were to be released and more humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza.

Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas official, said the deal was designed to include the possibility of extending the truce.

“It [the possibility of an extension] was written in the agreement, that if Hamas gives more hostages, there will be more days of the ceasefire,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We have now agreed to release more hostages and extend the agreement for two days. This is good news for our people, especially the people of Gaza.

“I hope we can extend it until we reach the end of this war. We want to end the war. We are in a temporary ceasefire but we are trying to extend it. There is lots of support from Qatar, Egypt and many Western governments to end this catastrophe,” he said.

During the first three days of the truce, 39 Israeli hostages were freed by the armed group in exchange for 117 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails as part of the deal between the two sides.

As a result of parallel negotiations led by the Gulf state, 17 Thais, one Filipino and one dual Russian-Israeli national have also been released by Hamas.

Hamas fighters seized around 240 hostages when they stormed from Gaza into southern Israel on October 7 and killed more than 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.

After the attack, Israel launched a relentless bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza, killing more than 15,000 people, including more than 5,000 children, according to Palestinian officials.

Reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim said families across the occupied Palestinian territories would be relieved by the extension.

“This is a source of relief for many families, not just the families of prisoners, but also other people in the occupied West Bank who are watching in horror images coming out of the besieged Gaza Strip.

“We are not just referring to the killings and children who’ve lost their lives, but also to the people who have been displaced, to the wounded, to the many hungry and in a very difficult situation.

“We are also talking about families of prisoners. So far we do not have a list,” she said, adding that according to a Hamas official, the extension will see the release of at least four more Palestinian prisoners.”

Ahead of the expected release, Hamas said it received the list of names of prisoners to be released on Monday, according to a statement for group on its Telegram channel.

The list includes three female prisoners whom it named, and another 30 minors the movement said it would identify later on.

Meanwhile, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it had informed families of the identities of hostages to be released on the last day of the initial four-day truce.

As part of the truce deal, Hamas has so far released 39 Israeli hostages, with more expected later Monday. Israel has freed 117 Palestinian prisoners under the terms of the agreement. In parallel, 19 foreign nationals have also been released by Palestinian militants.

Warm welcome

Commenting on the development, the White House welcomed the extension of the humanitarian pause in Gaza, adding that it hopes Americans will be among the 20 hostages to be released next as eight to nine US citizens are believed to still be among those being held.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby, speaking to reporters at a news briefing, said conditioning aid to Israel is a worthwhile thought but that US President Joe Biden believes his approach is working.

Also welcoming the news, the United Nations chief hailed the two-day extension of the truce as a “glimpse of hope and humanity,” but warned it was not enough time to meet the aid needs of the Gaza Strip.

“I strongly hope that this will enable us to increase even more the humanitarian aid to the people in Gaza that (are) suffering so much – knowing that even with that additional amount of time, it will be impossible to satisfy all the dramatic needs of the population,” Guterres told reporters.

Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – Ayman Harb, a father of three children, stuck it out with his family in the Gaza City neighbourhood of Shujayea for more than a month of the war, even as Israeli bombs and tanks destroyed the besieged enclave’s largest urban centre.

Last week, just before a four-day humanitarian pause came into effect, he decided the family had to flee. One of his sons has cerebral palsy and requires an oxygen tank, and the Israeli soldiers threatened to shoot Harb if he did not throw away the oxygen.

Now in central Gaza, Harb has but one dream — for the truce to turn into a full-fledged ceasefire that allows him and his family to return home.

On Monday evening as the four-day truce was coming to an end, Qatar, which has played a central role in mediating talks that enabled the pause in fighting, announced that the halt in the war had been extended by another two days.

For families across Gaza, that brief respite also serves to underscore the suffering and humiliation of the enclave’s 2.3 million people, who have been under attack since October 7. Palestinians are calling for a permanent ceasefire, stressing that their priority is to return to their homes even if they were destroyed in the heavy bombardment over the past month and a half.

The truce, which began on Friday, has seen the release of Israeli civilian captives held by Hamas in exchange for the release of Palestinian women and children imprisoned by Israel.

It has quietened the skies over the Gaza Strip from the incessant sound of Israeli drones and warplanes. But it has done little to ease the collective trauma of the people of Gaza. According to the United Nations, 1.6 million people have been displaced from their homes, many forced to flee to the south of the strip. Some families who have tried to return to the north during the truce have been fired upon by Israeli snipers.

Others have been forced to live in what they describe as “shame”.

“I’ve been here staying in a tent on the grounds of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for a week, right next to the ambulances,” 41-year-old Harb said. “We are about 20 people in one tent, but I had to send my wife and my other two children to stay with a relative after the rain soaked our tent this morning.”

“Yes, the bombings have stopped, but we need a truce that will return us to our homes,” he added. “Otherwise, there is no point in one. I’d rather go back to my home and die there than stay here in a tent living in shame and being forced to rely on people for the basic necessities of life.”

Harb said his family had to beg before in their lives. Now they are desperate for medicine, food and water.

“We don’t want war. We just want to live in our homes with our dignity intact,” his 20-year-old cousin Badr said.

Imm Shadi al-Taher, a 63-year-old mother of 10, was displaced from her home in Tall az-Zaatar in Gaza City three weeks ago.

She has also been staying with 25 members of her family in one tent on the hospital grounds.

“We had our pride and dignity, but look at the state we are in now, this destitution and the fact that no one is looking to help us or is thinking of us,” she said.

She acknowledged the “huge relief” of not hearing the sound of drones, warplanes or artillery shelling, noting that her grandchildren are more relaxed, but she cannot bear to stay away from her home, which was destroyed.

“I’m willing to live in a tent but on the ruins of my home, where I don’t need to ask anyone for help,” she said. “I want to go back to bury my siblings who are still under the rubble of their own destroyed homes.”

According to the Gaza media government office, at least 6,800 people are missing and presumed dead under the rubble. This is in addition to the 14,854 Palestinians killed since October 7, the majority of them women and children.

For Noor Saadeh, a 23-year-old mother of two who was displaced from her home in Gaza City a month ago, the truce is not enough.

“What’s the point of a truce if we cannot go back to our homes?” she asked. “My son keeps telling me he misses his friends at nursery school. We want our old life back.”

She is worried about the onset of winter since she and her family fled while it was still warm and have no way to go back to their home.

“I had to ask people for appropriate clothes for the children at the very least,”  she said. “We didn’t think we would be here for this long.”

On the steep slope of a glacier jutting through the Hunza Valley in Pakistan’s mountainous far north, Tariq Jamil measures the ice’s movement and snaps photos. Later, he creates a report that includes data from sensors and another camera installed near the Shisper glacier to update his village an hour’s hike downstream.

The 51-year-old’s mission: mobilise his community of 200 families in Hassanabad, in the Karakoram mountains, to fight for a future for their village and way of life, increasingly under threat from unstable lakes formed by melting glacier ice.

When glacial lakes overfill or their banks become unsound, they burst, sparking deadly floods that wash out bridges and buildings and wipe out fertile land throughout the Hindu Kush, Karakoram, and Himalayan mountain ranges that intersect in northern Pakistan.

Himalayan glaciers are on track to lose up to 75 percent of their ice by the century’s end due to global warming, according to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

After all the sensors are installed, village representatives will be able to monitor data through their mobile phones. “Local wisdom is very important,” Jamil said. “We are the main observers. We have witnessed many things.”

Hassanabad is part of the United Nations-backed Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) II project to help communities downstream of melting glaciers adapt.

Amid a shortfall in funding for those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, village residents say they urgently need increased support to adapt to threats of glacial lake floods.

“The needs are enormous,” said Karma Lodey Rapten, regional technical specialist for climate change adaptation at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Pakistan is the only country to receive adaptation funding from the Green Climate Fund – the Paris Agreement’s key financing pot – to ease the risk of such floods.

While countries like Bhutan have worked with other funders to minimise the threat from glacial lake floods, the $36.96m GLOF II scheme – which ends this year – is a global benchmark for other regions grappling with this threat, including the Peruvian Andes and China.

Since 2017, weather stations as well as sensors measuring rainfall, water discharge, and river and lake water levels have been installed under the administration of Islamabad and UNDP. GLOF II has deployed speakers in villages to communicate warnings, and infrastructure like stone-and-wire barriers that slow floodwater.

In Hassanabad, a villager regularly monitors the feed from a camera installed high up the valley, checking water levels in the river by the glacier’s base, during risky periods such as summer, when a lake dammed by ice from the Shisper glacier often forms.

Pakistan is among the world’s most at-risk countries from glacial lake floods, with 800,000 people living within 15km (9.3 miles) of a glacier. Many residents of the Karakorams built their homes on lush land along rivers running off glaciers.

On October 7, Hamas launched deadly attacks on southern Israel, prompting a relentless aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a subsequent ground offensive by Israel that has killed nearly 15,000 Palestinians.

The war has changed the lives of people all across the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel, a 26,790sq-km (10,345sq-mile) area similar in size to Haiti (27,750sq km/10,715sq miles) or Albania (28,748sq km/11,100sq miles).

What has changed, however, varies dramatically from place to place.

In Israel’s north near the border with Lebanon, sporadic shelling occurs throughout the day, and most locals have been evacuated as tensions with Hezbollah rise.

The locals who remain live in near ghost towns and are often heavily armed.

Those who have been displaced also include the residents of the kibbutzim and towns in southern Israel near Gaza. They have been moved into hotels, often in scenic seaside locations. Five-star hotels along the Dead Sea coast no longer exude a sense of luxury as families spread out in common areas, children playing loudly in their new temporary homes.

The seaside resorts in Israel’s southern city of Eilat by the Red Sea and sandwiched between Jordan and Egypt have also been filled with Israeli families from near the Gaza border. The city has been the subject of missile attacks from Houthi fighters in Yemen. Israeli warplanes roar over beach bars and fancy restaurants as they scramble to deal with the threat over the sun-drenched Gulf of Aqaba.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli raids have killed more than 200 Palestinians while Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem have faced regular harassment by police and the Israeli military since October 7. Palestinians there speak of a “collective punishment”, in which Israeli authorities are targeting the Palestinian community for the Hamas attacks, which killed 1,200 people.

At times, there is some commonality to the experience of life at war. At other times, there is profound contrast, from the images of families in Gaza without access to clean water forced to wash in polluted seawater to volleyball matches and sunbathers farther up the coast on Tel Aviv’s popular beachfront.

In Gaza, the bombardments have left swathes of the besieged enclave in ruins. In cities across Israel, regular rocket attacks are largely intercepted by the Iron Dome system. Some people choose to take shelter, and others go about their daily business.

And then, at other times, the different experiences are less visible but no less deep: Scratch beneath the surface and the tensions are palpable. Palestinians living in Israel can go about their daily lives but speak privately of being silenced, unable to express solidarity or even sympathy for the people of Gaza.

Here is a snapshot of life at war.