التصنيف: estaql

Hospital director says 179 bodies interred together in courtyard as Israeli forces encircle the facility.

Staff at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital have buried dozens of dead patients in a mass grave, hospital officials say, as thousands of Palestinians remain trapped in the facility surrounded by Israeli forces.

“There are bodies littered in the hospital complex, and there is no longer electricity at the morgues,” Al-Shifa Hospital Director Mohammad Abu Salmiya told the AFP news agency on Tuesday. “We were forced to bury them in a mass grave.”

He said 179 bodies had been interred so far in the courtyard and seven babies and 29 intensive care patients were among those who have died since fuel for the hospital’s generator ran out on Saturday.

Israeli forces have surrounded the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, which Israel says sits atop a complex of tunnels and a command centre used by fighters from the armed wing of the Palestinian group Hamas, which governs Gaza.

Hamas has denied fighters are present and said 650 patients and 5,000 to 7,000 displaced civilians are trapped inside the hospital grounds and under constant fire from snipers and drones.

The United Nations estimated that at least 2,300 people – patients, staff and displaced civilians – are inside and may be unable to escape amid fierce fighting.

The deteriorating conditions at hospitals in Gaza has been a source of tension between Israel and its allies during Israel’s assault and siege on Gaza, which has cut off access to fuel.

Speaking on Monday, US President Joe Biden said he hoped to see “less intrusive action relative to hospitals”.

The United Nations said 22 of 36 hospitals in Gaza are not functional due to lack of generator fuel, damage and combat.

“The 14 hospitals remaining open have barely enough supplies to sustain critical and lifesaving surgeries and provide inpatient care, including intensive care,” said the World Health Organization (WHO) in the Palestinian Territories.

Gaza Ministry of Health spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra said on Tuesday that an Israeli offer to move babies out of Al-Shifa Hospital with portable incubators has not resulted in a concrete plan.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva on Tuesday, WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris said moving sick and vulnerable patients out of the hospital was an “impossible task”.

“And again, why would you need to move them?” she asked. “A hospital should never be under attack. A hospital is a place of safe haven. This is agreed under international humanitarian law.”

Israel has denied that the hospital is under siege and said it is giving people inside the hospital routes to escape. Medical workers and health officials in the hospital have rejected the claim and said Israeli fire has brought additional danger to the performance of their medical duties.

“The occupation is still besieging the hospital, and they are firing into the yards from time to time,” al-Qudra said. “We still can’t move around, but sometimes doctors are taking the risk when they need to attend to patients.”

Israel has bombarded Gaza and launched a ground offensive after Hamas fighters from the territory carried out an attack on southern Israel last month, killing more than 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.

The Israeli assault has killed more than 11,200 people, including more than 4,600 children, according to Palestinian officials.

US Treasury Department has said that the sanctions were jointly coordinated with the UK and target Hamas financing.

The United States and the United Kingdom have announced jointly coordinated sanctions targeting the Palestinian armed groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

In a statement on Tuesday, the US Department of the Treasury said that it was imposing a third round of sanctions on Hamas, targeting the group’s leadership and and the mechanisms through which Iran provides support to the group and the PIJ.

“Hamas’s actions have caused immense suffering and shown that terrorism does not occur in isolation,” US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in the statement.

“Together with our partners we are decisively moving to degrade Hamas’s financial infrastructure, cut them off from outside funding, and block the new funding channels they seek to finance their heinous acts.”

Britain added sanctions on four Hamas senior leaders and two financiers, the Foreign Office said in a statement, including the group’s political leader in Gaza and the commander of its military arm.

The fresh sanctions against Hamas come more than one month after the group launched a deadly assault on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities.

Israel has vowed to eliminate the group, launching a ground offensive and hammering the Gaza Strip with air strikes, severely restricting food, water and electricity and cutting off fuel supplies to Gaza’s more than 2.3 million residents.

Palestinian authorities in Gaza say more than 11,200 people have been killed in the Israeli assault, including more than 4,600 children.

About 70 percent of people in Gaza have been displaced by the fighting after the Israeli military ordered people in northern Gaza to move south, but Israel continues to bombard the southern end of the Strip.

The latest sanctions focus on Hamas leaders, as well as individuals and entities who allegedly act as conduits for Iranian funding. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the US would continue to work with other countries to “disrupt these terrorist financing channels”.

In a press release, the Treasury Department said that the US has designated Mahmoud Khaled Zahhar, who it calls a “senior member and co-founder” of Hamas.

The United States, in coordination with the UK, is imposing sanctions on individuals and entities that have supported Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist groups. We continue to coordinate with our partners and allies to disrupt these terrorist financing channels.

— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) November 14, 2023

The sanctions also target the Lebanon-based money exchange company Nabil Chouman & Co, which the US says is used by Hamas to transfer money from Iran to Gaza. The owner of the company and his son were both also designated.

The US also took aim at the smaller PIJ, which is allied with Hamas and took part in the October 7 attacks, sanctioning Nasser Abu Sharif, the group’s representative to Iran, and Akram al-Ajouri, the group’s deputy secretary-general.

The sanctions freeze any US assets held by the designated individuals or entities and generally bar people in the US from dealing with them.

Mohammed al-Halbousi calls decision ‘strange’, implies it violates constitution and undermines national stability.

Iraq‘s top court has terminated the tenure of Parliament speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi, who called the decision “strange” and suggested it violated the constitution and undermined national stability.

The Federal Supreme Court’s ruling on the career of the country’s most powerful Sunni politician is final and not subject to appeal, according to state media reports on Tuesday.

The court said in a statement that it decided to terminate al-Halbousi’s membership in Parliament along with that of lawmaker Laith al-Dulaimi. It did not elaborate on why it was issuing the decision.

In a video shared by his media office, al-Halbousi also said: “We are surprised by the issuance of such decisions, we are surprised by their lack of respect for the constitution.”

He said that in his five years as speaker he had operated with integrity and “never discriminated” between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

The decision was related to a case brought against al-Halbousi this year by the same court, state media reported, without elaborating, according to the Reuters news agency.

Lawmakers had gathered for a regular parliamentary session and al-Halbousi was in the chamber at the time the decision was issued but then exited, independent Iraqi lawmaker Amer al-Fayez told Reuters.

Al-Halbousi, a former governor of Anbar province, was elected speaker in 2018. He was 37 at the time and the youngest speaker of Parliament in Iraq’s history. He was re-elected in 2022 for a second term.

He has been the highest Sunni official in Iraq. Under the country’s sectarian power-sharing system, the Parliament speaker is always Sunni, the prime minister Shia and the president Kurdish.

Now 42, the former engineer from western Iraq who worked as a US contractor after the United States’ invasion in 2003, cultivated good relations with the Shia  Muslims and Kurds who helped his rise to power.

However, he lost support within Iraq’s ruling Shia alliance, the Coordination Framework (CF), after he tried to form a government with their opponents following parliamentary elections in 2022. He ultimately joined the CF in government, but analysts say the damage was done and he was seen as untrustworthy and as accumulating too much power due to his push to rally Sunnis who had been politically divided since 2003 into a unified front.

The court’s decision was against the backdrop of a dispute between al-Halbousi and al-Dulaimi, also Sunni. Al-Dulaimi had filed a lawsuit against al-Halbousi claiming that the speaker had forged his signature on a resignation letter, an allegation the speaker denied, The Associated Press news agency reported.

Deputy Speaker Mohsen al-Mandalawi will take over as interim speaker until a new head of the legislature is appointed.

The political shakeup comes ahead of Iraq’s scheduled provincial elections on December 18. Polls for provincial councils last took place a decade ago.

Idlib, Syria — Syrian government forces and Russia have stepped up the bombardment of northwest Syria, killing dozens of people, including children, and wounding hundreds of others, opposition leaders and emergency volunteers have said, at a time when Israel’s war on Gaza is holding the world’s attention.

Russian and Syrian attacks in October focused on cities and villages in the countryside of Idlib and Aleppo. This escalation resulted in the total deaths of 66 civilians, including 23 children and 13 women, and left more than 270 people injured, with 79 children and 47 women among the casualties, according to a Syrian volunteer emergency rescue group.

While the pace of aerial and artillery bombardment in northwest Syria has decreased since the beginning of November, Syrian regime forces have shifted their attention to targeting civilian vehicles using guided missiles.

Syrian Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, said that from the beginning of the current year until November 8, their teams responded to 17 guided-missile attacks by regime forces. These attacks resulted in the deaths of four civilians, including a White Helmets volunteer, and injured 15 civilians, including two children.

Idlib is the last province controlled by opposition fighters in Syria, governed by a ceasefire agreement between Turkey and Russia since March 5, 2020. However, this agreement is occasionally violated by Syrian government forces.

“The military escalation by al-Assad regime, the Russians, and the Iranians against civilians in northern Syria has not stopped for a single day, but it intensifies and weakens from time to time based on international, regional, and local circumstances,” said Mustafa al-Bakour, a leader in Syrian opposition factions in northwest Syria, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Al-Bakour told Al Jazeera that Russia and the Syrian regime exploited the world’s preoccupation with the war in Gaza to escalate in northwest Syria, aiming to exert pressure on Turkey and Syrian opposition factions regarding issues such as opening the international road between Syria and Turkey. The M4 and M5 are among the most crucial arteries for international trade in Syria, serving as a transportation link connecting the country to Northern Europe, South Asia and the Arabian Gulf.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the recent escalation has displaced over 120,000 civilians from their cities and villages to shelters and camps near the Syrian-Turkish border.

“Based on the facts on the ground, I do not believe the conditions are suitable now or even in the near future for any military action by either side,” said al-Bakour. “However, I am not ruling out the continuation of shelling operations by al-Assad and Russian forces on civilians in northern liberated Syria.”

On November 6, the Russian news agency Interfax quoted Admiral Vadim Kulit, the deputy director of the Russian Center for Reconciliation in Syria, saying that Russian air forces carried out airstrikes on a drone warehouse in Idlib province, which was purportedly used for attacks on Syrian government-controlled sites. Al-Bakour denied to Al Jazeera the Russian claims of Syrian opposition factions possessing drones.

Military bases and strategic gains

Since its military intervention in Syria in 2015, Russia has sought to establish numerous military bases on its ally’s territory, including the Hmeimim Air Base in the Latakia countryside, as well as a naval base in Tartus, the only Russian deployment point in the Mediterranean.

“Russian intervention in Syria was not out of love for Bashar al-Assad’s regime but to gain strategic assets that were previously beyond Russia’s reach, such as military presence in the Middle East and, especially, obtaining a naval base in the Mediterranean to monitor NATO forces’ movements,” said Turki Mustafa, an Idlib-based political analyst and historian.

Mustafa told Al Jazeera that Russia consistently claims, when bombing cities and villages in northwest Syria, to be fighting “terrorism”, but in reality, it aims to draw attention to itself as a key regional and international player, even at the expense of civilians. “I rule out Russia launching a ground military campaign in northwest Syria, given Moscow’s need for Ankara and its strategic role in several files, most notably the Ukrainian file,” said Mustafa.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented the killing of about 7,000 civilians, including 2,046 children and 978 women, by Russian forces alone since the start of its military intervention in Syria to support al-Assad regime eight years ago.

Video shows the first rainfall on Gaza since October 7 as displaced Palestinians are faced with yet another challenge, a rainy winter.