The outlines of a Gaza deal are obvious. But the suffering continues.
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Yahoo
a few seconds ago
- Yahoo
US envoy to discuss Israel ceasefire as Lebanon commits to disarming Hezbollah
The US special envoy to Lebanon said that his team would discuss the long-term cessation of hostilities with Israel after Beirut endorsed a US-backed plan for the Hezbollah militant group to disarm. Tom Barrack, following a meeting with Lebanese president Joseph Aoun, also said Washington would seek an economic proposal for post-war reconstruction in the country, after months of shuttle diplomacy between the US and Lebanon. Mr Barrack is also set to meet with prime minister Nawaf Salam and speaker Nabih Berri, who often negotiates on behalf of Hezbollah with Washington. 'I think the Lebanese government has done their part. They've taken the first step,' said Mr Barrack, who is also the US ambassador to Turkey. 'Now what we need is for Israel to comply with that equal handshake.' Lebanon's decision last week to support a plan to disarm Hezbollah angered the Iran-backed group and its allies, who believe Israel's military should first withdraw from the five hilltops it has occupied in southern Lebanon since the end of its 14-month war with Hezbollah last November and stop launching almost daily airstrikes in the country. Naim Kassem, Hezbollah's secretary-general, has vowed to fight efforts to disarm the group, sowing fears of civil unrest in the country. Mr Barrack warned Hezbollah that it will have 'missed an opportunity' if it does not back the calls for it to disarm. Mr Aoun and Mr Salam both want to disarm Hezbollah and other non-state armed groups, and have demanded Israel halt its attacks and withdraw from the country. Mr Aoun said he wants to increase funding for Lebanon's cash-strapped military to bolster its capacity. He also wants to raise money from international donors to help rebuild the country. The World Bank estimates that Hezbollah and Israel's months-long war in late 2024 cost 11.1 billion dollars in damages and economic losses as larges swaths of southern and eastern Lebanon were battered. The country has also faced a crippling economic crisis since 2019.
USA Today
2 minutes ago
- USA Today
'Blatant deception': Hamas rejects Israel's Gaza relocation plan
CAIRO, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Palestinian militant group Hamas said on Sunday that Israel's plan to relocate residents from Gaza City constitutes a "new wave of genocide and displacement" for hundreds of thousands of residents in the area. The group said the planned deployment of tents and other shelter equipment by Israel into southern Gaza was a "blatant deception". The Israeli military has said it is preparing to provide tents and other equipment starting from Sunday ahead of its plan to relocate residents from combat zones to the south of the enclave "to ensure their safety". Hamas said in a statement that the deployment of tents under the guise of humanitarian purposes is a blatant deception intended to "cover up a brutal crime that the occupation forces prepare to execute". More: Israelis stage nationwide protests to demand end to Gaza war and release of hostages Israel said earlier this month that it intended to launch a new offensive to seize control of northern Gaza City, the enclave's largest urban centre. The plan has raised international alarm over the fate of the demolished strip, which is home to about 2.2 million people. The war began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. About 20 of the remaining 50 hostages in Gaza are believed to be still alive. Israel's subsequent military assault against Hamas has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, Gaza's health ministry says. It has also caused a hunger crisis, internally displaced most of Gaza's population and left much of the enclave in ruins. (Reporting by Nidal Al-Mughrabi; Writing by Menna Alaa El-Din;Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Sharon Singleton)
New York Times
3 minutes ago
- New York Times
Takeaways From The Times's Investigation Into Syria's Missing Children
In December, rebel forces ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, ending a 13-year civil war in the country that killed more than half a million people. Since then, Syrians have been trying to uncover the fates of the more than 100,000 people who vanished into the regime's secret prisons, including thousands of children whose parents were thought to be disloyal to the regime. The Assad government and its proxies forcibly disappeared at least 3,700 children, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, and the true number could be far higher. Hundreds of these children were separated from their families and secretly placed in orphanages, including six facilities run by an international NGO called SOS Children's Villages. Many of them were given false identities to prevent their relatives from finding them, and some were then adopted away. The Times obtained copies of dozens of Assad-era classified documents and several vast databases created by Air Force Intelligence, an agency responsible for the operation, that together provide the clearest picture yet of its scale and cruelty. Below are the key findings of the investigation, which you can read in full here. Syria's secret police were in charge of placing children at orphanages. The orders to remove children from their parents or other family members came from senior Air Force Intelligence officials. In numerous memos obtained by the Times, they tasked the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor or the governor of Rural Damascus with finding orphanage placements, and instructed them to seek approval from the mukhabarat, or secret police, before making any further decisions about the children's fate. The ministers and governors then ordered orphanages to keep the children hidden and block the release of any identifying information. The Times found that children were sent to at least nine facilities, six of which belonged to SOS Children's Villages. An international NGO played a crucial role. SOS Children's Villages International, headquartered in Austria, claims to be the world's largest NGO for children without parental care. The organization operates in 127 countries and reports nearly $2 billion in annual revenue. The Syrian case is not the first time that SOS has received children who were forcibly disappeared. In El Salvador, in the 1980s, the U.S.-backed military attacked villages suspected of supporting a leftist insurgency and kidnapped hundreds of children, who were then placed in orphanages, including those run by SOS. SOS's international spokesman, Bertil Videt, told The Times that the organization 'did not intentionally contribute to the disappearance of any child, and we unequivocally disapprove of such practices.' But government records and interviews indicate that, in Syria, SOS staff received children directly from the regime's secret prisons and, when families came looking for them, often refused to acknowledge that they had the children or release them to their relatives unless the mukhabarat signed off. The Times learned that as early as 2017, SOS staff began raising alarms to the international offices about holding disappeared children, but it wasn't until the following year that the organization ended the practice. Even then, SOS did not initiate an internal investigation and did not make public what it knew. The secret police continued to send children to other orphanages through the end of the war. Earlier this year, under pressure to explain its role, SOS conducted an internal review that found that between 2013 and 2018, Syrian security services placed at least 139 children in its care. Of those, 34 have been reunited with relatives. SOS says it returned all but one of the remaining 105 to the Assad regime, and the organization has no knowledge of what happened to them. Many children's identities were altered. The Times interviewed many children of political detainees who had their names changed during their detention, including two who were placed with SOS. Videt, the SOS spokesman, told The Times that because Syrian security agencies rarely supplied documentation, 'it is impossible to confirm whether all names were accurate,' but maintained that SOS 'was never instructed to change or invent names for children in our care.' Yet official records raise further questions. A 2013 memo from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor instructed SOS to 'follow the same procedures in registering children of unknown parentage' used by a government-run orphanage later known as Lahn al-Hayat, where many children's identities were altered. The Assad regime may have had a second motivation for changing children's names: In Syria, children of 'unknown parentage' cannot be conscripted into the army, which was in dire need of soldiers for its war. Several former residents of the Lahn al-Hayat orphanage told The Times that they were given new identities when they reached the age for military service. Many of them were forced to join the army, and at least one was thrown in prison for trying to leave the front. Syria's new government is investigating. In May, Syria's new government formed a committee to investigate the forced disappearance of children during the war. Since then, the former directors of several orphanages and two former ministers of social affairs and labor have been detained and questioned over their suspected involvement. The signatures of at least a dozen other high-ranking officials appear on the documents obtained by The Times, but none of them have yet been questioned by Syrian authorities. Many former Assad-regime officials are thought to be in hiding outside Syria. The investigative committee has so far identified 314 children of detainees who ended up in orphanages — a number believed to be incomplete, as some facilities destroyed or doctored their own records. Many of the children were so young when they were taken from their parents that they don't remember their origins. 'There are children we've met who were raised by foster parents but don't know who their original families are,' Raghda Zedan, the head of the committee, told The Times. 'With some families, it's clear how they got their foster children, but there are others who need to be investigated.' DNA testing will be necessary — but Syria lacks the resources. The new government and civil society groups are currently engaged in an effort to trace children and reunite them with their families. In Argentina and El Salvador, where hundreds of children were forcibly disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s, DNA databases and widespread genetic testing were crucial in matching children with their relatives. DNA testing would be similarly helpful in Syria, but the country currently lacks the capacity to do it at scale without outside assistance from international teams of scientists and forensic anthropologists.
