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CAIRO: Egypt condemned on Saturday as “irresponsible” statements by Israeli officials suggesting establishing a Palestinian state on Saudi territory, according to a statement by Egypt's foreign ministry.
The foreign ministry said it considered the suggestion a “direct infringement of Saudi sovereignty”, adding that the Kingdom's security was a “red line for Egypt”.
— Egypt MFA Spokesperson (@MfaEgypt)
UNITED NATIONS: Daesh extremists are exploiting instability in Africa and Syria and remain a significant threat in Afghanistan, Central Asia and Europe, UN counterterrorism experts said Wednesday.
The militant group is now using advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, and social media, which poses a new challenge, the experts told a UN Security Council meeting.
The Daesh group , which uses the name Islamic State,declared a self-styled caliphate in a large swath of Syria and Iraq that it seized in 2014. It was declared defeated in Iraq in 2017 following a three-year battle that left tens of thousands of people dead and cities in ruins, but its sleeper cells remain in both countries and it has affiliates and supporters in many other countries.
The UN has seen a resurgence of activity by the Daesh in the Sahel — in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — and in West Africa the group has emerged “as a prolific producer of terrorist propaganda and attracted foreign terrorist fighters, primarily from within the region,” said Vladimir Voronkov, who heads the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism.
He said arrests in Libya have revealed logistics and financing networks with connections to Daesh in the Sahel.
In Somalia, Voronkov said, a large-scale Daesh attack was countered by Somali security forces and some 200 IS fighters were killed and over 150 arrested. But he said despite the losses IS still benefits from regional support networks and remains a threat.
In northcentral Africa’s Lake Chad Basin region, the Islamic State is “increasingly receiving foreign material and human support to conduct its operations, including money, drones and expertise on improvised explosive devices,” said Natalia Gherman, who heads the executive directorate of the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee.
“Its ability to adapt and exploit instability continues to pose significant challenges, particularly in parts of Africa,” she said. “The continent bears over half the world’s fatalities from terrorist attacks.”
In the Middle East, Voronkov said IS is active in Iraq and Syria, where it is trying to restore its operations in the northwest Badia desert region and renew effort to destabilize local authorities. He said the militants are exploiting security gaps, conducting covert operations and inciting sectarian tensions in Syria.
In Afghanistan, the Daesh group’s Khorasan affiliate “continues to represent one of the most serious threats to Central Asia and beyond,” Voronkov said, citing its targeting of civilians, minority groups and foreign nationals.
Gherman added that IS-Khorasan is using “propaganda tactics and online campaigns” to try to recruit and fundraise in Central Asia and Europe.
She called for innovative responses to the Daesh group’s use of artificial intelligence and social media for recruitment, fundraising and propaganda.
“Although AI is being harnessed to amplify the group’s reach and impact, it also holds significant potential for states to enhance the detection, prevention and disruption of terrorist activities,” Gherman said.
Elisa De Anda Madrazo, president of the Financial Action Task Force, which researches how terrorism is financed, said a major change is that “Digital platforms such as social media, messaging apps and crowdfunding systems are increasingly being abused for terrorist financing.”
TOKYO: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, after Israel announced the first steps of an operation to take over Gaza City.
“It is vital to reach immediately a ceasefire in Gaza,” that was necessary “to avoid the death and destruction that a military operation against Gaza City would inevitably cause,” Guterres said in Japan where he is attending the Tokyo International Conference on African Development.
Israel, which has called up tens of thousands of army reservists, is pressing ahead with its plan to seize Gaza’s biggest urban center despite international criticism of an operation likely to force the displacement of many more Palestinians. Israel currently holds about 75 percent of the Gaza Strip.
The war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when gunmen led by Hamas attacked southern Israeli communities, killing some 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and taking 251 hostages including children into Gaza, according to Israeli figures.
Israel’s military offensive on the Gaza Strip has killed at least 60,000 Palestinians, according to enclave’s health ministry.
Guterres called for the unconditional release of hostages held by Hamas. He also urged Israel to reverse a decision to expand “illegal” settlement construction in the West Bank.
The Israeli settlement plan, which would bisect the occupied West Bank and cut it off from East Jerusalem, was announced last week and received the final go-ahead from a Defense Ministry planning commission on Wednesday.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said the construction would isolate Palestinian communities living in the area and undermine the possibility of a two-state solution.
KHARTOUM: On the streets of Sudan’s capital Khartoum, builders clear rubble from houses pockmarked with bullet holes, haul away fallen trees and repair broken power lines, in the city’s first reconstruction effort since war began over two years ago.
Fighting between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which broke out in April 2023, has left the capital battered and hollowed out.
But reconstruction — led by government agencies and youth-led volunteer groups — has finally begun to repair hospitals, schools and water and power networks.
“We are working to restore the state’s infrastructure,” volunteer Mostafa Awad said.
Once a thriving metropolis of nine million people, Khartoum’s skyline is now a jagged silhouette of collapsed buildings.
Electrical poles lean precariously or lie snapped on the ground in the streets. Cars, stripped for parts, sit burnt-out and abandoned, their tires melted into the asphalt.
AFP correspondents saw entire residential blocks standing with their exterior walls ripped away in the fighting.
Danger remains within the soot-stained buildings as authorities slowly work to clear tens of thousands of unexploded bombs left behind by fighters.
The UN warns Khartoum is “heavily contaminated by unexploded ordnance,” and this month said land mines have been discovered across the capital.
Sudan’s war has killed tens of thousands, displaced 13 million and plunged the nation into the world’s worst hunger and displacement crisis.
Until the army pushed the RSF out of Khartoum in March, the capital — where four million alone were displaced by fighting — was a battlefield.
Before they left, paramilitary fighters stripped infrastructure bare, looting everything from medical equipment and water pumps to copper wiring.
“Normally in a war zone, you see massive destruction... but you hardly ever see what happened in Khartoum,” the UN’s resident and humanitarian coordinator Luca Renda said.
“All the cables have been taken away from homes, all the pipes have been destroyed,” he told AFP, describing systematic looting of both small and large-scale items.
Today, power and water systems remain among the city’s greatest challenges.
The head of east Khartoum’s electricity department, Mohamed Al-Bashir, described “massive damage” in the capital’s main transformer stations.
“Some power stations were completely destroyed,” he told AFP, explaining the RSF had “specifically targeted transformer oil and copper cables.”
Vast swathes of Khartoum are without electricity, and with no reliable water supply, a cholera outbreak gripped the city this summer.
Health officials reported up to 1,500 new cases a day in June, according to the UN.
On his first visit to Khartoum last month, Sudan’s prime minister pledged a wide-scale recovery effort.
“Khartoum will return as a proud national capital,” Kamil Idris said.
Even as war rages on elsewhere in the country, the government has begun planning its return from its wartime capital Port Sudan.
On Tuesday, it announced central Khartoum — the devastated business and government district where some of the fiercest battles took place — would be evacuated and redesigned.
The UN estimates the rehabilitation of the capital’s essential facilities to cost around $350 million, while the full rebuilding of Khartoum “will take years and several billion dollars,” Renda told AFP.
Hundreds have rolled up their sleeves to start the long and arduous rebuilding work, but obstacles remain.
“We faced challenges such as the lack of raw materials, especially infrastructure tools, sanitation (supplies) and iron,” said Mohamed El Ser, a construction worker.
“Still, the market is relatively starting to recover,” he told AFP.
In downtown Khartoum, a worker, his hands coated in mud, stacks bricks beside a crumbling building.
AFP correspondents accompanied workers carefully refitting pipes into what once was a family home, while nearby others lifted slabs of concrete and mangled metal into wheelbarrows.
On one road that had been a front line, a man repaired a downed streetlight while others dragged a felled tree onto a flatbed truck.
The UN expects up to two million people to make their way back to Khartoum by the end of the year.
Those who have already returned, estimated to be in the tens of thousands, say life is still difficult, but there’s reason for hope.
“Honestly, there is an improvement in living conditions,” said Ali Mohamed, who recently returned.
“There is more stability now, and real services are beginning to come back, like water, electricity and even basic medical care.”
LONDON: Israel has “work” to do in winning over young people in the West as polls show collapsing support, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to a UK-based podcast in an interview aired Wednesday.
Protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza have become increasingly common in capitals across the West, attracting large numbers of young people.
A recent Gallup poll also showed only six percent of 18 to 34-year-olds in the United States had a favorable opinion of Netanyahu and just nine percent approved of Israel’s military action in Gaza.
On the “Triggernometry” podcast, Netanyahu was asked whether Israel could lose the backing of Western governments once “Gen Z” — those born between around 1997 and 2012 — assumes power.
“If you’re telling me that there’s work to be done on Gen Z and across the West, yes,” he responded.
But he said opposition to Israel among Gen Z stemmed from a wider campaign against the West and repeated his unproven claim of an orchestrated plot against Israel and the West, without saying who was behind it.
Israel’s defense minister approved a plan on Wednesday for the conquest of Gaza City and authorized the call-up of around 60,000 reservists, piling pressure on the Palestinian militant group Hamas as mediators push for a ceasefire.
Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel’s offensive has killed at least 62,122 Palestinians, most of them civilians, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said, in figures the United Nations deem reliable.
Since returning to the White House in January, US President Donald Trump has offered Israel ironclad support.
Netanyahu told the podcast, which bills itself as promoting free speech with “open, fact-based discussion of important and controversial issues,” that Trump “has proven an exceptional, exceptional friend of Israel, an exceptional leader.”
“I think we’ve been very fortunate to have a leader in the United States who doesn’t act like the European leaders, who doesn’t succumb to this stuff,” he added, referring to countries including France and the UK that have vowed to recognize a Palestinian state.
BEIRUT: A US-led coalition captured a senior member of the Daesh group in northwest Syria on Wednesday, state media and a war monitor reported. It was not immediately clear if the man is the Daesh supreme leader.
Abu Hafs Al-Qurayshi, an Iraqi citizen and Daesh commander, was detained during a pre-dawn operation that included landing troops from helicopters in the town of Atmeh, near the Turkish border. Another Iraqi citizen was killed, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The US military did not respond to a request for comment.
The Observatory said the man captured had a French-speaking woman with him, and it was not immediately clear if she was taken by the US force or by Syrian security forces who later cordoned the area.
Two years ago, Daesh announced that a man called Abu Hafs Al-Hashemi Al-Qurayshi was named as its new leader after Turkish authorities killed his predecessor.
Syrian state TV on Wednesday quoted an unnamed security official as saying the Iraqi man targeted in the operation is known as Ali, adding that his real name is Salah Noman. It said Noman was living in an apartment with his wife, son and mother. It said he was killed in the raid.
There was no immediate clarification for the difference in names reported by state media and the war monitor.
UN counter-terrorism chief Vladimir Voronkov told the UN Security Council on Wednesday that while multiple leaders of the Daesh have perished in the past few years, “the group has managed to retain its operational capacity.”
“There is no indication that the killing of its deputy leader in charge of operational planning, which resulted from counter-terrorism operations in Iraq in March, will be any different,” he said, citing unnamed countries as saying the extremist group may recover from such a loss within six months.
Acting US Ambassador Dorothy Shea made no mention of Wednesday’s arrest, but said the Trump administration has intensified counter-terrorism operations globally, including targeting the Daesh, also known as ISIL, and Al-Qaeda’s leadership, infrastructure, and financial networks.
Daesh broke away from Al-Qaeda more than a decade ago and attracted supporters from around the world after it declared a so-called caliphate in 2014 in large parts of Syria and Iraq. Despite its defeat in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, Daesh militants still carry out deadly attacks in both countries and elsewhere.
Al-Qurayshi is not the real name of Daesh leaders but comes from Quraish, the name of the tribe to which Islam’s Prophet Muhammad belonged. Daesh claims its leaders hail from the tribe, and “al-Qurayshi” is part of their nom de guerre.
