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Iran and Afghanistan called for increased cooperation during a trip to Kabul on Sunday by Tehran’s foreign minister, the highest-level Iranian official to visit the Afghan capital since the Taliban’s takeover in 2021.Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with his Afghan counterpart, Amir Khan Muttaqi, and Taliban government Prime Minister Hassan Akhund during a one-day visit to discuss relations between the neighbouring countries that spar over issues including migration and water resources.The two sides covered economic cooperation, the situation of Afghan migrants in Iran, border issues and water rights, an Afghan foreign ministry statement said.Araghchi praised the countries’ economic, trade and political relations in his talks with Muttaqi, according to an Iranian statement, adding he hoped that “during this trip we will be able to further expand the ties in line with the national interests of both sides”, emphasising security and economic arenas.Muttaqi “expressed hope that (Araghchi’s) visit to Kabul would create further momentum in relations between the two countries and they would enter a new phase of bilateral relations”, the Afghan foreign ministry said.Many countries closed their embassies in Kabul or downgraded diplomatic relations after the Taliban takeover that ousted the US-backed government, but Iran has maintained active diplomatic ties with Afghanistan’s new rulers, though it has yet to officially recognise the Taliban government. Several Iranian delegations have visited Afghanistan over the years, including a parliamentary delegation in August 2023 to discuss water rights. – Water and migration -Tensions between the countries have intensified in recent years over water resources and the construction of dams on the Helmand and Harirud rivers. Araghchi said the issues of water and migration demanded expanded cooperation and called for the full implementation of bilateral water treaties, according to an Afghan foreign ministry statement.Muttaqi said the region was suffering from climate change-induced drought and that Taliban authorities were “trying to ensure that water reaches both sides” of the Iran-Afghanistan border.Muttaqi and Akhund also called for the situation of Afghan migrants in Iran to be improved and for their “dignified” return to Afghanistan.Afghans returning from Iran have accused Iranian authorities of harassment, wrongful deportation and physical abuse.Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says Tehran is repatriating illegal nationals to their country “in a respectful manner”. Iran shares more than 900 kilometres (560 miles) of border with Afghanistan, and the Islamic republic hosts one of the largest refugee populations in the world — mostly Afghans fleeing decades of war.The flow of Afghan immigrants has increased since the Taliban took power.Iranian media announced in September the building of a wall along more than 10 kilometres of the eastern border with Afghanistan, the main entry point for migrants.Officials said at the time that additional methods to fortify the border including barbed wire and water-filled ditches to counter the “smuggling of fuel and goods, especially drugs”, and to prevent “illegal immigration”.

Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad reacted defiantly on Sunday to US President Donald Trump’s idea to “clean out” Gaza, as a fragile truce aimed at permanently ending the war entered its second week.There was no immediate reaction from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but a far-right minister welcomed Trump’s “great” idea.Meanwhile, a dispute linked to the latest hostage-prisoner swap under the truce deal led to vast crowds of Palestinians jamming a coastal road after they were blocked from returning to the territory’s north.The swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 Palestinian prisoners released on Saturday to joyful scenes, in the second such exchange so far.After 15 months of war, Trump said Gaza had become a “demolition site”, adding he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out of the territory. “I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump told reporters, adding he expected to talk to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday.Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said that “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”Most Gazans are Palestinian refugees or their descendants.For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.Egypt has previously warned against any “forced displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert, which Sisi said could jeopardise the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979.Jordan is already home to around 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations.”You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said of Gaza, whose population is about 2.4 million.”I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump said.Moving Gaza’s inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term”, he added.- ‘Deplorable’ -Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP that Palestinians would “foil such projects”, as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades”.Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, called Trump’s idea “deplorable” and said it encouraged “war crimes and crimes against humanity by forcing our people to leave their land”.But far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza, said Trump’s suggestion of “helping them find other places to start a better life is a great idea”.Almost all Gazans have been displaced by the war that began after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.The United Nations says close to 70 percent of the territory’s buildings are damaged or destroyed.On Sunday, cars and carts loaded with belongings jammed a road near the Netzarim Corridor that Israel has blocked, preventing the expected return of hundreds of thousands of people to northern Gaza.Israel announced on Saturday it would prevent Palestinians’ passage until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage who Netanyahu’s office said “was supposed to be released”.- Waiting to enter -On Sunday, Netanyahu’s office said that by not releasing her on Saturday and not providing a “detailed list of all hostages’ statuses”, Hamas had committed truce violations.Hamas later said that blocking returns to the north also amounted to a truce violation, adding it had provided “all the necessary guarantees” for Yehud’s release.During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages should be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.The hospital that received the first three hostages Hamas released a week ago said the women were all discharged on Sunday.The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire”.Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.Israel has also reached a ceasefire with Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon which stipulates that Israeli forces must withdraw by a Sunday deadline.The Lebanese health ministry said Israeli troops killed more than a dozen people on Sunday as hundreds of residents tried to return to their homes in southern Lebanon.The Israeli army said soldiers “fired warning shots” against “suspects were identified approaching the troops”.burs/imm/ami

A vast crowd of Gazans massed near an Israeli military barrier preventing them from heading to their homes in the north on Sunday amid a row between Hamas and Israel over the terms of their ceasefire deal.Aerial footage from AFPTV showed the crowd fanning out for hundreds of metres from a junction on a coastal road in the Nuseirat area and spilling onto a nearby beach.Dotted among the crowd were water tankers, ambulances, donkey carts, TV crews and their vehicles, and dozens of tents in which displaced Gazans sat and waited for permission to continue their journey.AFP journalists at the scene said the mass of people stretched for three kilometres (1.9 miles) along Al-Rashid Road, with Gaza police preventing civilians from getting close to the Israelis, whose jets and drones flew overhead.Dozens of displaced people camped in the garden of a bombed-out villa, some of them milling around in its empty swimming pool.Whole families sat on the side of the road waiting for news, their belongings bundled up in blankets or crammed into overstuffed backpacks.Saeed Abu Sharia, 49, said he arrived on Saturday night and slept outside while his wife, mother and children stayed in his car for warmth.”I burned the tent last night because it was a symbol of misery and humiliation,” he said. Fifty of his relatives were killed in the 15-month war, said Abu Sharia, whose home was also destroyed.  – Belongings piled high -A few kilometres inland, hundreds of Palestinian families were waiting next to their cars in a long traffic jam on Salah al-Din Street, with everything they owned piled in great mounds atop their vehicles and strapped down tight.”Tens of thousands of displaced people are waiting near the Netzarim Corridor to return to the northern Gaza Strip,” Gaza civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP, with Israel refusing to allow them through in a dispute over a hostage release. Ismail al-Thawabtah, director general of the government media office in Hamas-run Gaza, also said there were tens of thousands waiting at the junction.He put the total number of Gazans wanting to return to the north at “between 615,000 and 650,000”, with two-thirds of them likely to use the coastal road.The Netzarim Corridor is a seven-kilometre strip of land militarised by Israel that bisects the Gaza Strip from the Israeli border to the Mediterranean Sea. The corridor cuts off the north from the rest of the territory.Israel and Hamas have accused each other of violating the terms of the ceasefire, which began a week ago.As part of the deal, Israel was due to let displaced Gazans cross the corridor and return to their homes, with Hamas officials saying this would happen on Saturday.Israel, however, accused Hamas of reneging on the deal by not releasing hostage Arbel Yehud on Saturday. Yehud was one the 251 hostages seized during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the war.As a civilian woman, Yehud “was supposed to be released” as part of the second hostage-prisoner swap under the truce deal, a statement from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.”Israel will not allow the passage of Gazans to the northern part of the Gaza Strip until the release of civilian Arbel Yehud… is arranged,” it added.Two Hamas sources told AFP on Saturday that Yehud was “alive and in good health”, with one source saying she would be “released as part of the third swap set for next Saturday”, on February 1.Hamas on Sunday said Israel blocking returns to the north amounted to a truce violation, adding it has provided “all the necessary guarantees” for Yehud’s release.On the other side of the corridor in north Gaza was Bashar Naser, a 28-year-old from Jabalia, who had been waiting for his relatives since early morning.”We want to welcome them and celebrate… this is a great joy.”

Israeli troops opened fire in south Lebanon on Sunday, killing 10 residents and a Lebanese soldier, health officials said as hundreds of people tried to return to their homes on the deadline for Israel to withdraw.Israel was all but certain to miss Sunday’s deadline, which is part of a ceasefire agreement that ended its war with the Iran-backed Hezbollah group two months ago.The deal that took effect on November 27 said the Lebanese army was to deploy alongside United Nations peacekeepers in the south as the Israeli army withdrew over a 60-day period.That period ends on Sunday.Lebanon’s health ministry said Israeli forces opened fire on “citizens who were trying to return to their villages”, killing 11 and wounding 83.The ministry’s toll includes a soldier from the Lebanese army, which also announced his death and said Israeli fire had wounded another soldier.AFP journalists said convoys of vehicles carrying hundreds of people, some flying yellow Hezbollah flags, were trying to get to several villages despite the Israeli military’s continued presence.”We will return to our villages and the Israeli enemy will leave,” even if it costs lives, said Ali Harb, a 27-year-old trying to go to Kfar Kila.- Pictures of Nasrallah -Residents could also be seen heading on foot and by motorbike towards the devastated border town of Mays al-Jabal, where Israeli troops are still stationed.Some held up portraits of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, while women dressed in black carried photos of family members killed in the war.Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee had issued a message earlier on Sunday to residents of more than 60 villages in southern Lebanon telling them not to return.Speaking from the border town of Aita al-Shaab, Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah hailed in a television appearance “the return of residents in spite of the threats and warnings”.Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, the former army chief who took office earlier this month after a two-year vacancy in the post, called on residents to keep a cool head and “trust the Lebanese army”, which he said wanted “to ensure your safe return to your homes and villages”.On Saturday, the army had said the delay in implementing the agreement was the “result of the procrastination in the withdrawal from the Israeli enemy’s side”.A joint statement from the UN special coordinator for Lebanon and the head of the UN peacekeeping mission on Sunday acknowledged “that the timelines envisaged in the November Understanding have not been met”. “As seen tragically this morning, conditions are not yet in place for the safe return of citizens to their villages along the Blue Line,” the statement said, referring to the border. It urged residents “to exercise caution”.Israeli forces have left coastal areas of southern Lebanon, but are still present in areas further east.The ceasefire deal stipulates that Hezbollah pull back its forces north of the Litani River — about 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the border — and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure in the south.But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Friday that the “agreement has not yet been fully enforced by the Lebanese state”, so the military’s withdrawal would continue beyond the Sunday deadline.The Lebanese army said it was “ready to continue its deployment” as soon as Israel left. Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati called Sunday for the backers of the ceasefire agreement — a group that includes the United States and France — “to force the Israeli enemy to withdraw”.- Demolitions -Lebanese state media have reported that Israeli forces have carried out demolitions in villages they control.Aoun spoke on Saturday with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron about the “need to oblige Israel to respect the terms of the deal”, adding it must “end its successive violations, including the destruction of border villages”.Macron’s office said the French president had called on all parties to the ceasefire to honour their commitments as soon as possible.The fragile truce has generally held, even as the warring sides have repeatedly traded accusations of violations.The deal ended two months of full-scale war that had followed nearly a year of low-intensity exchanges.Hezbollah began trading cross-border fire with the Israeli army the day after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by its Palestinian ally Hamas, which triggered the war in Gaza.Israel’s campaign delivered a series of devastating blows against Hezbollah’s leadership including its longtime chief Nasrallah.

Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad reacted with defiance on Sunday to a plan floated by US President Donald Trump to “clean out” Gaza, as a fragile truce aimed at permanently ending the war entered its second week.There was no immediate reaction from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but a far-right minister welcomed Trump’s “great” idea.Meanwhile, a dispute linked to the latest hostage-prisoner swap under the truce deal led to vast crowds of Palestinians jamming a coastal road after they were blocked from returning to the territory’s north.The swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 Palestinian prisoners released on Saturday to joyful scenes, in the second such exchange so far.After 15 months of war, Trump said Gaza had become a “demolition site”, adding he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out of the territory. “I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump told reporters, adding he expected to talk to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday.Most Gazans are Palestinian refugees or their descendants.For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark historical memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation 75 years ago.Egypt has previously warned against any “forced displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert, which Sisi said could jeopardise the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979.Jordan is already home to around 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations.”You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said of Gaza, whose population is about 2.4 million. “I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump said, adding that moving Gaza’s inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term”. – ‘Deplorable’ -Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP that Palestinians would “foil such projects”, as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades”.Gazans, he said, “will not accept any offers or solutions, even if their apparent intentions are good under the banner of reconstruction, as proposed by US President Trump.”Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, called Trump’s idea “deplorable” and said it encouraged “war crimes and crimes against humanity by forcing our people to leave their land”.But far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who opposed the Gaza truce deal, said Trump’s suggestion of “helping them find other places to start a better life is a great idea”.He added: “Only out-of-the-box thinking with new solutions will bring a solution of peace and security.”Almost all Gazans have been displaced by the war that began after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.The United Nations says close to 70 percent of the territory’s buildings are damaged or destroyed.- Waiting to enter -On Sunday, cars and carts loaded with belongings jammed a road near the Netzarim Corridor that Israel has blocked, preventing the expected return of hundreds of thousands of people to northern Gaza.Aerial footage showed the crowd stretching hundreds of metres in three directions, with Gaza’s civil defence agency saying “tens of thousands” were waiting in the area to go north.Israel announced on Saturday it would prevent Palestinians’ passage to the north until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage who Netanyahu’s office said “was supposed to be released”.On Sunday, Netanyahu’s office said that by not releasing her on Saturday Hamas had committed a truce violation. It said they had also violated the deal by not providing a “detailed list of all hostages’ statuses”, the office said.Hamas later said that blocking returns to the north also amounted to a truce violation, adding it had provided “all the necessary guarantees” for Yehud’s release.Israel has also reached a ceasefire with Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the health ministry and army on Sunday said Israeli troops killed three residents and a Lebanese soldier as hundreds of people tried to return to their homes on the deadline for Israeli forces to withdraw from the area.During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages should be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire”.Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,283 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.burs-ami/it/smw

Sudan’s army chief visited on Sunday his headquarters in the capital Khartoum, two days after forces recaptured the building, which had been encircled by paramilitary fighters since the war erupted in April 2023.”Our forces are in their best condition,” Abdel Fattah al-Burhan told army commanders at the reclaimed headquarters close to the city centre and airport.The army’s recapture of the General Command building is its biggest victory in the capital since reclaiming Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city on the Nile’s west bank, nearly a year ago.In a statement on Friday, the army said it had merged troops stationed in Khartoum North (Bahri) and Omdurman with forces at the headquarters.Since the war with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began, RSF had encircled both the Signal Corps in Khartoum North and the General Command of the Armed Forces just south across the Blue Nile river.On Friday the army said it had broken the siege on Signal Corps, later reporting it had also retaken its headquarters.Since the early days of the war, when the RSF quickly spread through the streets of Khartoum, the military had to supply its forces inside the headquarters via airdrops.Burhan was himself trapped inside for four months, before emerging in August 2023 and fleeing to the coastal city of Port Sudan.The recapture of the headquarters follows other gains for the army.Two weeks ago, troops regained control of Wad Madani, just south of Khartoum, securing a key crossroads between the capital and surrounding states.- ‘The best medicine is peace’ -The war in Sudan has unleashed a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.Tens of thousands of people have been killed and, according to the United Nations, more than 12 million uprooted.Famine has been declared in parts of Sudan but the risk is spreading for millions more people, a UN-backed assessment said last month.Late last year, then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said people had been forced to eat grass and peanut shells to survive in parts of the country.Both sides have been accused of targeting civilians and indiscriminately shelling residential areas, with the RSF specifically accused of ethnic cleansing, systematic sexual violence and laying siege to entire towns.The United States announced sanctions this month against RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, accusing his group of committing genocide.A week later, it also imposed sanctions against Burhan, accusing the army of attacking schools, markets and hospitals, as well as using food deprivation as a weapon of war.Across the country, up to 80 percent of healthcare facilities have been forced out of service, according to official figures.A deadly attack late Friday on the main hospital in El-Fasher, a besieged town in western Sudan, killed 70 people and injured 19 others, the World Health Organisation said on Sunday.”At the time of the attack, the hospital was packed with patients receiving care,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X.In a rare statement addressing the targeting of healthcare in Sudan, Saudi Arabia also condemned the attack as a “violation of international law and international humanitarian law”.AFP could not independently verify which of Sudan’s warring sides had launched the attack.However, local activists reported that the hospital was hit by a drone after the RSF issued an ultimatum demanding army forces and their allies leave the city in advance of an expected offensive.The WHO chief said that another facility in North Darfur’s Al-Malha, just north of El-Fasher, had also been attacked in recent days.”We continue to call for a cessation of all attacks on health care in Sudan, and to allow full access for the swift restoration of the facilities that have been damaged,” Ghebreyesus said.”Above all, Sudan’s people need peace. The best medicine is peace,” he added.

Sudan’s army chief visited on Sunday his headquarters in the capital Khartoum, two days after forces recaptured the building which had been encircled by paramilitary fighters since the war erupted in April 2023.”Our forces are in their best condition,” Abdel Fattah al-Burhan told army commanders at the reclaimed headquarters, which are close to the city centre and airport.The army’s recapture of the General Command building is its biggest victory in the capital since reclaiming Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city on the Nile’s west bank, nearly a year ago.In a statement on Friday, the army said it had merged troops stationed in Khartoum North (Bahri) and Omdurman with forces at the headquarters.Since war with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began, RSF had encircled both the Signal Corps in Khartoum North and the General Command of the Armed Forces just south across the Blue Nile river.On Friday it said it had broken the siege on Signal Corps, and later said it had also retaken its headquarters.Since the early days of the war, when the RSF quickly spread through the streets of Khartoum, the military had to supply its forces inside the headquarters via airdrops.Burhan was himself trapped inside for four months, before emerging in August 2023 and fleeing to the coastal city of Port Sudan.The recapture of the headquarters follows other gains for the army.Two weeks ago, troops regained control of Wad Madani, just south of Khartoum, securing a key crossroads between the capital and surrounding states.The war in Sudan has unleased a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.Tens of thousands of people have been killed and, according to the United Nations, more than 12 million uprooted.Famine has been declared in parts of Sudan but the risk is spreading for millions more people, a UN-backed assessment said last month.Late last year, then United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken said people are forced to eat grass and peanut shells to survive in parts of the country.