AFP Asia Business

Israel threatened a severe response to three rockets it said had been fired from Lebanon Saturday, prompting the Lebanese prime minister to warn the country risked being dragged into a “new war”.A fragile ceasefire that took effect on November 27 has been marred by repeated accusations of violations by both sides but the Israeli warning marked the biggest threat so far to the relative calm it had brought to border areas.Air raid sirens sounded in the border town Metula early on Saturday. The army said it was the first time sirens had sounded in response to rocket fire from Lebanon since the day before the truce.The Israeli military said all three rockets were intercepted and there was no immediate claim of responsibility.But Israeli defence chiefs said they held the Lebanese government responsible for all hostile fire from its territory regardless of who launched it.”We cannot allow fire from Lebanon on Galilee communities,” Defence Minister Israel Katz said, referring to towns and villages in the north, many of which were evacuated after Lebanese militant group Hezbollah began firing on Israel in support of Hamas in October 2023.”The Lebanese government is responsible for attacks from its territory. I have ordered the military to respond accordingly,” Katz said.”We promised security to Galilee communities, and that is exactly what will happen. Metula’s fate is the same as Beirut’s.”Armed forces chief Eyal Zamir warned the military would “respond severely”.”The state of Lebanon bears responsibility for upholding the agreement,” he said, referring to the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah which was signed by the government on the Lebanese side.- PM warns Lebanon risks new ‘woes’ -Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam warned the country risked being catapulted into a “new war” after months of relative calm.”Salam warned against renewed military operations on the southern border, because of the risks they carry of dragging the country into a new war, which will bring woes to Lebanon and the Lebanese people,” his office said.Lebanon’s official National News Agency said Israeli warplanes flew over eastern areas of southern Lebanon and that interceptor missiles exploded.NNA said Israeli ground troops were strafing the Hamames hills with automatic weapon fire.It also reported Israeli artillery fire on the Nabatieh district in the south and the town of Khiam, which was hit by “three shells (fired by) Merkava tanks”.Salam urged the defence minister to “take all the necessary security and military measures, insisting that only the state can decide on war and peace”.There was no immediate claim for the rocket fire reported by the Israeli army.Although Hezbollah launched the great majority of the rockets fired during the past two years, the Lebanese arm of Palestinian militant group Hamas claimed some attacks.Under the terms of the ceasefire, Hezbollah was supposed to pull its forces back north of the Litani River, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the Israeli border and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure in the south.Israel has carried out repeated air strikes during the ceasefire that it said targeted Hezbollah military sites that violated the agreement.Saturday’s flare-up on the Lebanese border came as Israel’s renewed offensive against Hamas militants in Gaza entered its fifth day.Israel’s resumption of military operations in the Palestinian territory on Tuesday shattered the relative calm that had reigned since a January 19 ceasefire.Israel’s defence minister said Friday that he had ordered the army to “seize more territory in Gaza”, which he would annex if Hamas failed to heed Israel’s demands for the next steps in the Gaza ceasefire.”The more Hamas refuses to free the hostages, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed by Israel,” Katz said.When the first stage of the ceasefire expired early this month, Israel rejected negotiations for a promised second stage, calling instead for the return of all its remaining hostages under an extended first stage.That would have meant delaying talks on a lasting ceasefire, and was rejected by Hamas as an attempt to renegotiate the original deal.burs/kir/dv

When he arrived in the town of Masaoudiyeh in northern Lebanon earlier this month, fleeing massacres on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, Dhulfiqar Ali had escaped death not once but twice.He is among thousands of Syrians who have fled across the border after armed groups descended on the Syrian coastal heartland of ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority and killed hundreds of civilians, mostly Alawites.”They didn’t even speak Arabic… they knew only: ‘Alawites, pigs, kill them’,” Ali said of the gunmen.A mobile phone shop owner who lived in an Alawite neighbourhood of Homs, Ali had already been attacked before, soon after Assad was toppled in a lightning offensive by Islamist-led rebels in December.”They shot and killed my two brothers in front of me and they shot me and thought I was dead,” said the 47-year-old father of two, who now lives with his family at a school in Masaoudiyeh.He escaped to the mountains near Latakia in January to receive treatment, only to be forced to flee again, this time across the border.Lebanon says nearly 16,000 Syrians have arrived since early March — adding to the already substantial population of 1.5 million Syrians who sought refuge in the country during the nearly 14-year civil war.Most are now in predominantly Alawite villages and towns in Lebanon’s northern region of Akkar, including nearly 2,500 in Masaoudiyeh.Masaoudiyeh Mayor Ali Ahmed al-Ali said the town was “above capacity”.- ‘Extermination’ -According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, security forces and allied groups in Syria killed at least 1,614 civilians, the vast majority of them Alawites, during the violence that erupted on March 6.Still using a crutch to walk because of his gunshot injury, Ali said those who had descended on the coastal areas were “not Syrians”.The group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that spearheaded the offensive that toppled Assad is an offshoot of the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, and is still proscribed as a terrorist organisation by countries including the United States.After the massacres in Syria, a fact-finding committee was formed to investigate.But Ali and many others told AFP the violence began well before March.Samir Hussein Ismail, a 53-year-old farmer from Hama province, said his small village of Arzeh was attacked in late January, and nine people were killed.He fled alone first, and only after the coastal killings did his family follow.The armed groups “came to my village again on Friday morning, on March 7″, Ismail told AFP.”They exterminated everything,” he said, adding that more than 30 men from Arzeh were killed.Among them were six of his cousins, he said in the modest schoolroom with a tall pile of mattresses in a corner.Like most now living in the school, he was among 10 people, or two families, sharing the space.”We have to distinguish between massacres — the massacres are still ongoing in Syria — but everything that happened after March 7 is extermination, and not a massacre,” Ismail said.- ‘No one dared leave’ -Many people AFP spoke to described men being lined up and shot dead.Almost unanimously, they called for “international protection” so they could return home.Among those was Ammar Saqqouf, who said his cousin was taken by Syria’s new security forces and found dead days later.He said security forces began a sweep of his town. “Five or six days later, we found his body, decapitated.”One woman, who gave her name only as Mariam, arrived in Lebanon last week with her son after her husband, a conscripted soldier, was killed.She fled her home town of Al-Qabu in Homs on foot, crossing the border by wading through the Al-Kabir River that divides it, like many others.”They attacked us in Al-Qabu,” she said from where she now lives alongside scores of others at a mosque in Masaoudiyeh.”People began fleeing and my husband told me and my son, ‘I will flee like those people.'”He fled, she said, “so they killed him”.Mariam described living in fear before they finally left.”No one dared leave to get a piece of bread. They surrounded the whole town.”We don’t even dare say we’re Alawites any more.”Ismail, the farmer from Arzeh, said he felt “deprived of his humanity”.”What future do we have ahead of us?” he asked.”We fled from hell.”

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz threatened Friday to annex parts of the Gaza Strip unless Hamas militants release the remaining Israeli hostages held in the war-battered Palestinian territory.The warning came as Israel pressed the renewed assault it launched on Tuesday, shattering the relative calm since a January 19 ceasefire.A Palestinian source close to the ceasefire talks told AFP late Friday that Hamas had received a proposal from mediators Egypt and Qatar for re-establishing a truce and exchanging hostages for Palestinian prisoners “according to a timeline to be agreed upon”.The source said the proposal “includes the entry of humanitarian aid” into Gaza, which has been blocked by Israel since March 2.Israel resumed intensive bombing of Gaza on Tuesday, citing deadlock in indirect negotiations on next steps in the truce after its first stage expired this month.The territory’s civil defence agency said Israeli strikes killed 11 people on Friday — three in pre-dawn strikes and eight more during the daytime. On Thursday, it had reported a death toll of 504 since the bombardment resumed, one of the highest since the war began more than 17 months ago with Hamas’s attack on Israel.In a statement Friday, Katz said: “I ordered (the army) to seize more territory in Gaza… The more Hamas refuses to free the hostages, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed by Israel”.Should Hamas not comply, Katz also threatened “to expand buffer zones around Gaza to protect Israeli civilian population areas and soldiers by implementing a permanent Israeli occupation of the area”.The military urged residents of the Al-Salatin, Al-Karama and Al-Awda areas of southern Gaza to evacuate their homes Friday ahead of a threatened strike. AFP images from northern Gaza showed donkey carts piled high with belongings as residents fled their homes along rubble-strewn roads. – ‘Pressure points’ -Israeli forces said Friday that they had killed the head of Hamas’s military intelligence in southern Gaza in a strike a day earlier, the latest official targeted in recent days. Israel’s resumption of large-scale military operations, coordinated with US President Donald Trump’s administration, drew widespread condemnation.The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Britain called for an immediate return to a Gaza ceasefire in a joint statement late Friday, calling the new strikes “a dramatic step backward”.Turkey’s foreign ministry condemned what it called a “deliberate” attack by Israel on a Turkish-built hospital in Gaza.”The IDF (military) struck terrorists in a Hamas terrorist infrastructure site that previously had served as a hospital in the central Gaza Strip,” a military spokesperson told AFP in response to a question about the Turkish accusations.In a statement, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza condemned “the heinous crime committed by the occupation (Israel) in bombing the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital”, calling it “the only hospital designated for the treatment of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip”.The ministry said Israeli forces had used the hospital as “a base for its forces throughout the period of its occupation of the so-called Netzarim axis”.Israeli President Isaac Herzog expressed worry about the government’s actions in a video statement Thursday, saying it was “unthinkable to resume fighting while still pursuing the sacred mission of bringing our hostages home”. Thousands of protesters have rallied in Jerusalem in recent days, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of resuming military operations without regard for the safety of the hostages.Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, 58 are still held by Gaza militants, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.- Projectiles from Gaza, Yemen -Israel’s military said late Friday that it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen, after air raid sirens sounded in Jerusalem and parts of central Israel.It is the fourth missile launched from Yemen towards Israel since Tuesday, after Huthi rebels threatened to escalate attacks in support of Palestinians following Israel’s renewed attacks on Gaza.In a statement early Saturday, the Iran-backed group said it had “targeted Ben Gurion airport” near Tel Aviv with a ballistic missile.Israeli airspace would remain unsafe “until the aggression against Gaza stops”, the group said in the statement.Earlier on Friday, Israel’s military said it intercepted two projectiles fired from northern Gaza, which Hamas’s armed wing said was in response to “massacres against civilians”.Katz said Israel would “intensify the fight with aerial, naval and ground shelling as well as by expanding the ground operation until hostages are freed and Hamas is defeated, using all military and civilian pressure points”.He said these included implementing Trump’s proposal for the United States to redevelop Gaza as a Mediterranean resort after the relocation of its Palestinian inhabitants to other Arab countries.

Major global stock markets mostly suffered another difficult day Friday, with heightened concerns over the potential fallout from US President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda blunting confidence.Gold held firm after hitting a new record Thursday. Oil prices picked up slightly amid simmering tensions in the crude-heavy Middle East, where Israel threatened to annex part of the …

Global stocks mostly slump as Trump tariffs hit confidence Read More »

A French court on Friday sentenced a French jihadist to life in prison for holding four journalists captive more than a decade ago in war-torn Syria.Mehdi Nemmouche, 39, was convicted of having held the French reporters hostage for the Islamic State jihadist group from June 2013 to April 2014.The sentence carries a minimum term of 22 years before he is eligible for parole.All four journalists during the trial said they clearly recognised Nemmouche’s voice and manner of speech as belonging to a so-called Abu Omar, who terrorised them and made sadistic jokes while they were in captivity.Nemmouche denied ever being their jailer, only admitting in court that he was an IS fighter in Syria.From the beginning of the trial last month, he has claimed only to have fought against the forces of former president Bashar al-Assad, who Islamists previously linked to Al-Qaeda helped topple in December.”It’s through terrorism that the Syrian people freed themselves from dictatorship,” he claimed on Friday morning ahead of the verdict.”Yes I was a terrorist and I will never apologise for that.”Nemmouche has said he joined Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate and then IS — both listed as “terrorist” in the European Union — while in the Middle Eastern country.Clutching notes on Friday morning, he cited a range of figures from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a speech criticising the “West”, especially the United States.Nemmouche is already in prison after a Belgian court jailed him for life in 2019 for killing four people at a Jewish museum in May 2014, after he had returned from Syria.- Torture, mock execution -IS emerged in 2013 in the chaos that followed the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, slowly gaining ground before declaring a so-called caliphate in large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq.A US-backed offensive dealt the final blow to that proto-state in 2019.IS abducted and held hostage 25 Western journalists and aid workers in Syria between 2012 and 2014, publicly executing several of them, according to French prosecutors.Reporters Didier Francois and Edouard Elias, and then Nicolas Henin and Pierre Torres, were abducted 10 days apart while reporting from northern Syria in June 2013.They were released in April 2014.Henin alerted the authorities after he saw a facial composite of the presumed perpetrator of the May 2014 Brussels attack that looked very familiar.Henin, in a magazine article in September 2014, recounted Nemmouche punching him in the face and terrorising Syrian detainees. During the trial, he detailed the repeated torture and mock executions he witnessed while in captivity.- Jihadists presumed dead -Nemmouche, whose father is unknown, was brought up in the French foster system and became radicalised in prison before going to Syria, say investigators.The court also handed life sentences to two other jihadists tried in absentia because they are presumed dead.Belgian jihadist Oussama Atar, a senior IS commander, had already been sentenced to life over the 2015 terror attacks in Paris claimed by IS that killed 130 people, and the Brussels bombings by the group that took the lives of 32 others in 2016.The other defendant was French IS member Salim Benghalem, accused of having been jailer-in-chief of the hostages.The court also handed a 22-year sentence to Frenchman Abdelmalek Tanem, 35, accused of being one of the jailers. None of the journalists had recognised Tanem, who said he was a bodyguard for several IS leaders and slept in the basement of an eye hospital where they were held hostage, but claimed to have never seen them.But prosecutors argued he was clearly one of around 10 French-speaking IS jailers.The court also handed a 20-year sentence to Kais Al Abdallah, a 41-year-old Syrian jihadist accused of having helped abduct the journalists and of having been deputy in command in the Syrian city of Raqqa, all of which he denies.