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Atop one of Egypt’s Sinai mountains, near where the three Abrahamic faiths say God spoke with Moses, another unmistakable sound rings out: the incessant drilling of construction work. In the remote, rugged terrain of southern Sinai, Egypt has undertaken a vast megaproject aimed at drawing mass tourism to the once serene mountain town of Saint Catherine.Heritage experts and locals say the state’s bulldozers have already damaged the nature reserve and UNESCO world heritage site, home to the world’s oldest functioning Christian monastery and Bedouin who fear for their ancestral land.”The Saint Catherine we knew is gone. The next generation will only know these buildings,” said a veteran hiking guide from the Jabaliya tribe, as a five-star hotel loomed overhead and the beeps of a reversing bulldozer drowned out the songbirds.Like others AFP interviewed about the nearly $300-million “Great Transfiguration” or “Revelation of Saint Catherine” project, he requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.”We should call this what it is, which is the disfigurement and destruction” of the site, John Grainger, the former manager of the European Union’s Saint Catherine protectorate project, told AFP.From above, bright lights and concrete overpower the town’s red-brick homes and orchards, in the form of hotels including a sprawling Steigenberger resort, a conference centre and hundreds of housing units.In July, World Heritage Watch urged UNESCO to list the area as a World Heritage site in danger.Last month, UNESCO elected Egypt’s former tourism and antiquities minister Khaled El-Enany as its chief. During his tenure, Egypt launched the Saint Catherine project and demolished swathes of Cairo’s historic City of the Dead cemetery, which is also a UNESCO site as well as an active burial place.- Mutiny at the monastery -Just beyond the site of the new project on biblical Mount Sinai, or Jebel Moussa, two dozen monks in black vestments tend a small cluster of ancient shrines.In May, an Egypt court ruled the Saint Catherine monastery sits on state-owned land and that the Greek Orthodox monks are merely “entitled to use” it, sparking a diplomatic row with Greece and uproar from Orthodox patriarchates. Egypt has defended the ruling, which critics say leaves the monastery dependent on authorities’ goodwill for its survival. In September, Saint Catherine’s archbishop resigned, reportedly after an unprecedented mutiny.Each morning, the monks still open their gates to visitors, mostly sunrise hikers accompanied by local Jabaliya guides.The Jabaliya, whose name derives from the Arabic word for “mountain”, have lived here for 1,500 years, and are said to descend from the Roman soldiers who came to guard the monastery. Each year, they guide hundreds of thousands of worshippers and adventurers, drawn to the sacred sites and the austere but magnificent landscapes. They have for decades called for better services and infrastructure to lift their community out of poverty.Long marginalised, they now fear that rapid development has come at their expense — even disturbing the dead.- ‘No room for us’ -In 2022, bulldozers levelled the town’s centuries-old cemetery, forcing people to exhume hundreds of bodies.”They just came in one day without saying anything and destroyed our cemetery,” said the hiking guide.The gravesite is now a car park.The South Sinai governor’s office did not respond to AFP’s questions about the cemetery and the local impact of the project.Government officials tout its economic benefits and say decisions were taken in consultation with the community, but locals told AFP their concerns had been ignored. “No one knows what will happen tomorrow. Maybe they’ll tell us to get out, that there’s no room for us anymore,” the guide added.Many still hope tourism will bring prosperity, even as they navigate life around bulldozers and struggle to keep up with soaring prices.”Did you hear they tore down half my house?” a 70-year-old casually told a friend. Across the country, many who have had their homes demolished in recent years for tourism or infrastructure projects, including overpasses and real-estate developments in Cairo, say state compensation does not meet their needs.After uproar from conservationists over Saint Catherine, UNESCO requested in 2023 that Egypt “halt the implementation of any further development projects”, conduct an impact evaluation and develop a conservation plan.Construction continued unabated and the government said in January the project was 90 percent complete.Gesturing across the monastery’s grapevines and cypresses towards a nearly finished five-star hotel, a local official laughed. “These hotels are huge, the costs astronomical. Are they even going to be full? That’s the real problem, but we can’t say anything,” he said.

Like a ghost in the night, Bilal Shorba, the artist they call the “Syrian Banksy”, slipped through the rubble of Daraya to paint his murals, praying that Bashar al-Assad’s gunners wouldn’t spot him.Returning from exile to one of the devastated cradles of the Syrian revolution — the only city that lost its entire population during the near-14-year civil war — he was amazed that some of his work had survived.On the wall of a destroyed house, one of his bullet-riddled murals, “The Symphony of the Revolution”, shows its tragic evolution from non-violent idealism to unrelenting death — a woman plays the violin as pro- and anti- Assad gunmen all take aim at her with their Kalashnikovs.Its very survival is “a victory”, said Shorba, 31. Despite the massacres, despite Assad forcing the people of Daraya from their homes, “despite our exile, these simple murals have remained, and the regime is gone”, he said.Daraya occupies a special place in the story of the Syrian revolution.Only seven kilometres (four miles) from the capital Damascus and within sight of Assad’s sprawling presidential palace, its people handed roses to the soldiers who were sent to quell their peaceful protests in March 2011.But they paid a heavy price for their defiance. At least 700 were killed in one of the worst massacres of the war in August 2012, when soldiers went from house to house executing anyone they found.A horrendous four-year siege followed, with the city starved, shelled and pummelled with barrel bombs, till Assad’s forces broke the resistance in 2016 and emptied the city of its people.Not a single one of its 250,000 pre-war inhabitants was allowed to stay, and many were forced into exile.Shorba came to Daraya from nearby Damascus in 2013 to join the rebels, armed with nothing more than “clothes for two or three days, pencils, a sketchbook” and a copy of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” in Arabic.He stayed for three years, enduring the siege and the bombardment, eating weeds and wild herbs to survive, until he and the other fighters were evacuated with the remaining residents to the rebel-held northwest of Syria in August 2016.He eventually made his way to neighbouring Turkey where he honed his art. There is much to do in Daraya now he’s back. But Shorba wants to start by painting over the giant murals glorifying the Assad clan that still stare down from the walls. – Not waiting to be helped – Women, children and those men who could prove they were not involved with the opposition were slowly allowed to trickle back to Daraya from 2019. But most men had to wait till after the fall of Assad on December 8, 2024.Many have since returned — doctors, engineers, teachers, workers and farmers — often bringing new skills learned abroad or money collected from expatriates to help the rebuilding. Others are bringing back the experience of having lived in a democracy to a country that has never really known it.Everyone in Syria talks of Daraya’s indomitable spirit, its people long renowned for their get-up-and-go attitude. But how do you bring up a family in a city where 65 percent of buildings are destroyed — according to a study by the Syrian American Engineers Association — and another 14 percent are badly damaged?There are power and water shortages, with only a quarter of the city’s wells working. In some areas sewage overflows into the street. Yet Hussam Lahham didn’t hesitate for a second to bring his young family back, the youngest of his three daughters born earlier this year after the liberation.One of the last to leave the city in 2016, the 35-year-old civil society leader was among the first to return. He organised food relief during the early days of the siege and ended it as a military commander.”We are the only ones capable of rebuilding our homes,” Lahham told AFP. “If we were to wait for the international community and NGOs, we may never have been able to return.”The dead also drew him back. Lahham lost more than 30 friends and relatives and feels acutely the debt owed for “the sacrifices Daraya made to regain its freedom”.Now a volunteer in the city’s civil administration, he’s keen to show that life goes on, even in the most precarious of circumstances. One family has moved back into an upper-storey apartment even though most of the outside walls are gone.  Some areas are a hive of activity, with workers fixing roofs, repairing bomb-damaged facades or fixing water pumps. Many of the city’s furniture workshops, for which it was long famous, are also back in business. But whole neighbourhoods are still deserted, with little more than rubble and the gutted skeletons of residential blocks.- Gutted hospitals -None of Daraya’s four hospitals are functioning. The city’s National Hospital, which once served a million people, was bombed to bits in 2016. All that remains is its concrete shell overlooking the completely destroyed al-Khaleej district. Even its copper pipes and electricity cables were looted after Assad’s forces took the city.”There is no hospital, no operating theatre” and no casualty department left in Daraya, Lahham said. Many healthcare professionals fled to Egypt, Jordan, Turkey or Europe and most have not returned. The only real cover comes from a team from the charity Doctors Without Borders, who are committed to running the only medical centre until the end of the year.Lahham is convinced that if there were more health services, “more people would return”. When Dr Hussam Jamus came back to Daraya, he did not recognise his city. “I expected it to be destroyed but not to this extent,” said the 55-year-old ear, nose and throat specialist, who fled with his family at the start of the siege in 2012.Having had a flourishing practice with 30,000 patients, he found himself in exile in Jordan, unable at first to practise as a consultant. So he volunteered, retrained and worked in a hospital run by the Emirati Red Crescent. He returned as soon as he could, hanging his plaque at the bullet-riddled entrance to his surgery. In just a few weeks, he had treated hundreds of patients, ranging from children with inflamed tonsils to “perforated eardrums or broken ones caused by beatings in detention”. “Just as I served my fellow citizens who were refugees in Jordan, I continue to serve them today in my own country” as it rebuilds, he said.This is also the goal of journalists at Enab Baladi, a media outlet born at the start of the war in Daraya, which has since become Syria’s leading independent voice.Four of its original team of 20 were killed between 2012 and 2016, before the survivors moved its newsroom to Germany and Turkey, where its reporters were trained. Enab Baladi has correspondents from Syria’s mosaic of communities — Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Kurds and Druze — and does not shy from sensitive subjects, even when it makes things uncomfortable with the new Islamist authorities.They covered the sectarian killings of Alawites, the branch of Shia Islam from which the Assad clan comes, in Latakia in March as well as the violence against the Druze minority in July in Sweida in the south.Standing in front of the ruins of the house from where it was first published, co-founder Ammar Ziadeh, 35, said he hoped that “independent media can maintain a space for freedom” in a country where journalists were silenced for decades. – Traumatised children – Mohammed Nakkash said he wanted to bring his two children, who were born in exile in Turkey, back to Daraya so they could finally feel at home — even though that home was in ruins.He hadn’t realised how much his boys Omar, six, and Hamza, eight, had been marked by the racism and isolation of being refugees until they returned. That was when he noticed how they had trouble “bonding with my parents and my siblings”, having been ignored by their Turkish classmates.Worried they might be autistic, he took them to a doctor. But they are now adapting, are back at school and are learning to relearn everything, having been taught in the Roman alphabet in Turkey.Daraya lost seven of its 24 schools in the war and is also struggling with a shortage of teachers and equipment now that 80 percent of the pre-war population has returned.Many pupils were born in exile in Jordan, Egypt or Lebanon. Those who went to school in Turkey “struggle with Arabic, which they speak but cannot write”, an education official said. Having buried “eight friends with my own hands” before fleeing, Nakkash, 31, is working as a carpenter. He is focused on rebuilding in every sense of the term.Like many who have lost their homes, he and his young family live with relatives, moving from one to the next as they outlive their welcome. “Every day we deal with returning residents who find their homes in ruins and ask us for shelter or help to rebuild,” said city council leader Mohammed Jaanina.But to rebuild you have to have your deeds — which often have been lost in the bombing or during their flight.- Hiding the dead -In the final days before Daraya fell in 2016, the last remaining fighters and activists — including Bilal Shorba and Hussam Lahham — tried to save the dignity of the dead.They took photos of the graves in the Cemetery of the Martyrs of all who had been massacred or killed during the siege, then removed the headstones in case they were desecrated by Assad’s fighters.Thanks to the photos, they have been able to put up 421 new gravestones for those whose names were known. In the plot opposite, under beds of well-tended shrubs, lie the mass graves of yet-to-be-identified victims of the August 2012 massacre, when government forces and allied militias rampaged through the city killing 700 people in just three days. “I am fighting to give my brothers a grave,” said Amneh Khoulani, holding back tears as she prayed in the cemetery.Three of her brothers were arrested and never seen again. A photo of one later appeared in the leaked “Caesar Files”, which contained images of some of the thousands who were disappeared in Assad’s torture and detention centres.”There is great suffering in Daraya. Many do not know where their children are,” said Khoulani, a member of the National Commission for the Missing who has twice spoken at the UN Security Council to appeal for justice.”We fought to rid ourselves of Assad, but now we are searching for graves,” said the activist, who divides her time between Britain and Syria. At the cemetery entrance, strings of faded photos of the missing flutter in the wind, with a banner reading, “They are not numbers.” Bilal Shorba has painted a mural on one of the cemetery walls. A little girl picks roses in memory of her father, but has no grave to put them on.

Lebanese and Israeli civilian representatives held their first direct talks in decades on Wednesday under the auspices of a year-old ceasefire monitoring mechanism, though Lebanon’s premier cautioned the new diplomatic contact did not amount to broader peace discussions.The two sides met at the UN peacekeeping force’s headquarters in Lebanon’s Naqura near the border with Israel, where the guarantors of the November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah regularly convene.Lebanon and Israel have technically been at war since 1948, but Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said the new discussions were strictly limited to fully implementing last year’s truce.”We are not yet at peace talks,” Salam told journalists, including AFP, on Wednesday.He said the talks only sought “the cessation of hostilities”, the “release of Lebanese hostages” and “the complete Israeli withdrawal” from Lebanon.Israel has kept up regular air strikes in Lebanon, usually saying it is targeting Hezbollah members and facilities, and it has kept troops in five areas in the south despite the ceasefire’s stipulation that it pull out entirely.Until now, Israel and Lebanon, which have no formal diplomatic relations, had insisted on limiting participation in the ceasefire mechanism to military officers.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the atmosphere at the talks was “positive”, and that there had been agreement “to develop ideas to promote potential economic cooperation between Israel and Lebanon”.Israel also made it clear it was “essential” that Lebanese militant group Hezbollah disarm regardless of any progress in economic cooperation, the premier’s office added.The ceasefire mechanism is orchestrated by the United States, and also includes the involvement of France and the UN.- ‘Normalisation will follow peace’ -The US embassy in Beirut said in a statement that Morgan Ortagus, the US special envoy for Lebanon, also attended Wednesday’s meeting. The United States has been piling pressure on Lebanon to rapidly disarm Hezbollah.Washington’s embassy welcomed the inclusion of the civilian representatives — former Lebanese ambassador to the US Simon Karam and Israeli National Security Council official Uri Resnick — in the ceasefire mechanism.”Their inclusion reflects the Mechanism’s commitment to facilitating political and military discussions with the aim of achieving security, stability, and a durable peace for all communities affected by the conflict,” it said.Ortagus was in Jerusalem a day earlier, where she met with Netanyahu and Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar. The United States has pushed for direct talks between the two neighbours in a bid to stabilise the region and further weaken Iran-backed Hezbollah.Salam on Wednesday said Lebanon was “open to verification by the mechanism” when it came to its army’s efforts to disarm Hezbollah in the country’s south.Lebanon has declared itself ready for negotiations with its southern neighbour.Netanyahu has repeatedly said Lebanon should join the Abraham Accords, under which a handful of Arab and Muslim countries have normalised ties with Israel.But Salam said on Wednesday that “normalisation will follow peace. It cannot precede peace.”- Ramped-up strikes -The new talks came days after the first anniversary of the start of the fragile truce between Israel and Hezbollah.The ceasefire sought to end over a year of hostilities that erupted after the militant group launched attacks in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.Israel has repeatedly bombed Lebanon despite the truce, saying it seeks to stop the group from rebuilding its military capabilities.Under a government-approved plan, the Lebanese army is set to dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure south of the Litani river by the end of the year, before tackling the rest of the country.Judging the Lebanese efforts insufficient, Israel has ramped up its strikes in recent weeks.Israeli public broadcaster KAN reported Tuesday that Israel has been preparing for a “significant escalation” with Hezbollah, deemed “inevitable” despite Washington’s efforts.burs-at/raz/smw