Region

RIYADH — Fierce storms closed schools Wednesday in Saudi Arabia’s Mecca region, home to Islam’s holiest site, the Grand Mosque, which was lashed by heavy rains and wind overnight, witnesses said.

As pilgrims tried to circumambulate the Kaaba, the giant black cube towards which all Muslims pray, a bolt of lightning struck the iconic Fairmont Mecca Clock Royal Tower hotel, illuminating the night sky late Tuesday.

The storm brought gale force winds exceeding 80 kilometres per hour, Hussein Al Qahtani, spokesman for the National Centre for Meteorology, told AFP.

The conditions were similar to a 2015 storm that felled a crane at the Grand Mosque, killing more than 100 people and injuring hundreds more, Qahtani said.

No casualties were reported in Tuesday’s storm.

Mecca resident Abu Mayyada told AFP he was out buying cigarettes and petrol when “everything went black in front of me” as the worst of the storm hit.

“Suddenly I lost control over the vehicle. I couldn’t see anything so I started listening to the Koran on the radio. I didn’t understand what was happening,” he said.

The Mecca neighbourhood of Al Kakkiyah recorded 45 millimetres of rain within 24 hours, the meteorology centre shared in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Footage shared with AFP by Mecca residents showed pilgrims outside the Grand Mosque who were toppled over by the wind, which also sent crowd barriers sliding across the rain-slicked floor.

“The scene was very scary,” said Mecca resident Mohammed, who was grocery shopping at the height of the storm.

“Everything happened within a few minutes, when it started raining in a crazy way.”

Another resident, Yusuf, said August usually brought strong winds to Mecca but that Tuesday’s storm was “the worst” he could remember.

Flash flooding had mostly dissipated by Wednesday morning, said the residents, who gave only their first names for fear of reprisals.

Nevertheless the Mecca regional government said on X that schools would be closed in parts of Mecca, with classes conducted on an e-learning platform, “in the interest of everyone’s safety”.

The meteorology centre warned of further storms on Wednesday bringing rain, wind and thunder to the Mecca region and elsewhere in western Saudi Arabia.

CAIRO — Starvation has killed at least 498 children and “likely hundreds more” in Sudan four months into a war between rival generals, Save the Children said on Tuesday.

The conflict between the army under General Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Daglo broke out on April 15.

Around 5,000 people have been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, and more than four million have been uprooted.

“At least 498 children in Sudan and likely hundreds more have died from hunger, including two dozen babies in a state orphanage,” Save the Children said in a statement.

The British charity said it had been forced to close 57 of its nutrition facilities since the war began and that stocks were running “critically low” in the 108 it still operates.

“Never did we think we would see children dying from hunger in such numbers, but this is now the reality in Sudan,” said Save the Children’s Sudan country director, Arif Noor.

“Seriously ill children are arriving in the arms of desperate mothers and fathers at nutrition centres across the country and our staff have few options on how to treat them.

“We are seeing children dying from entirely preventable hunger.”

In a statement last week, the heads of 20 international humanitarian organisations warned that “more than six million Sudanese people are one step away from famine”.

The violence continued on Tuesday, mainly in Khartoum and Darfur, a vast western region that is home to a quarter of Sudan’s 48 million population.

The fighting in Darfur is concentrated in Nyala, Sudan’s second city, where the United Nations says at least 60 people have been killed, 250 wounded and 50,000 since August 11.

The army said its commander there had been killed on Monday.

Trucks carrying aid have been unable to gain access to Nyala, while the only hospital still operating in the South Darfur capital says it has been overwhelmed with wounded.

The war spread this month to the North Darfur state capital of El Fasher, with at least 27 localities burned down by the RSF and allied Arab militias, according to the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.

“No one is stopping them. The RSF are moving freely while the army is turtled in its bases,” Nathaniel Raymond, who heads the Lab, told AFP.

ZABABDEH, Palestine — Israeli occupation troops killed a Palestinian teenager near the West Bank city of Jenin on Tuesday, the Palestinian health ministry said, as violence surged in the occupied territory.

Meanwhile, in the southern West Bank, troops made two arrests in the deadly on Monday shooting of a settler near the city of Hebron.

"Othman Mohammed Abu Khurog, 17, died after he was shot in the head by the occupation [Israeli forces]," the Palestinian health ministry said.

Abu Khurog was killed when clashes erupted in the small town of Zababdeh, southeast of Jenin, which Israeli forces had entered to make an arrest, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

Abu Khurog's death comes amid rising violence in the West Bank.

On Monday, Israeli settler Batsheva Nigri was shot dead from a passing vehicle while travelling in a car near Hebron with her daughter and a man.

Two Palestinian residents of Hebron suspected of taking part in the shooting were arrested on Tuesday as troops pressed a manhunt for the woman's killers, closing off roads in the area, the army said.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, called her killing a "heroic act" and a "normal response" to the persistent expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The settlements are considered illegal under international law but, not counting occupied East Jerusalem, around 490,000 Israelis live in such communities alongside nearly three million Palestinians.

With the latest death, at least 219 Palestinians have been killed in violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so far this year.

BEIRUT — Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets again Monday in Syria's southern city of Sweida, local media and an activist reported, as dire living conditions stoke discontent in regime-held areas.

Days of rare protests have erupted in the south after the government lifted fuel subsidies last week, dealing a blow to Syrians already struggling with the heavy toll that 12 years of war have exacted on the economy.

Local news outlet Suwayda24 posted videos showing hundreds of people gathered in the city on Monday, holding banners and chanting anti-government slogans.

"We've had enough, the Syrian people are suffocating," one activist in Sweida said on condition of anonymity for security reasons, adding that hundreds had gathered to protest in the city.

Soaring inflation, the rising cost of living, instability and poverty have plagued the country, pushing desperate Syrians to take to the streets, the activist said.

Security forces have not cracked down on demonstrators so far, he noted.

"My only hope is that this movement will spread to other provinces and that our voices will be heard," he told AFP.

Syria's war has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions since it broke out in 2011 following Assad's repression of peaceful pro-democracy protests.

It spiralled into a deadly conflict that pulled in foreign powers and extremists.

Sunday saw a strike over deteriorating living conditions and price hikes across Sweida province, he heartland of the country's Druze minority, which has been mostly spared the worst of the civil conflict.

'Quasi-mafia' 

One senior Druze religious leader has expressed support for demonstrators and chastised the government.

Footage on Monday showed protesters carrying local Druze sheikhs on their shoulders.

In December, one protester and a policeman were killed when security forces cracked down on a demonstration in Sweida against deteriorating living conditions.

On Saturday, dozens demonstrated in southern Syria’s Daraa province.

An activist said there were further protests on Sunday evening in the province, the cradle of Syria’s uprising.

Daraa returned to Damascus’ control in 2018 under a Russia-backed ceasefire deal, and has since been wracked by violence and dire living conditions.

Some residents also gathered in recent days in Jaramana, a suburb of the capital Damascus, to protest against recurrent power cuts, a witness told AFP.

The conflict has ravaged the country’s infrastructure and industry, the Syrian pound has lost most of its value against the dollar, and most of the population has been pushed into poverty.

Jihad Yazigi, editor of economic publication The Syria Report, said the fuel price hike came after years of punishing inflation, high unemployment and “generally an exhaustion of the population from the consequences of the war”, among other factors.

Resentment against Assad and his family “runs deep and the regime, which operates as a quasi-mafia, is simply incapable of offering long-term solutions”, he told AFP.

“The key will be to watch what happens in loyalist areas and in Damascus. That’s where it really matters,” he said.

TUNIS — Tunisia will again supply flour to more than 1,000 non-subsidised bakeries in the North African country after most of them ceased operating, government and industry officials said on Sunday.

The deal could help ease a bread shortage that has worsened over the past two weeks.

Since the beginning of August, European-style bakeries selling baguettes in the formerly French-ruled country had been prevented from accessing their quota of subsidised flour, after President Kais Saied said there should be “one type of bread for all Tunisians”.

Days later those same bakeries also stopped receiving non-subsidised flour and semolina from the state, which controls the supply of all such essential goods in the country.

Known as “modern bakeries”, the shops sell at a higher price and also offer pastries and other breads. More than 3,700 other bakeries sell only subsidised baguettes at a cost of 190 Tunisian millimes (around $0.07 cents), a price unchanged since 1984.

“It has been decided to resume the supply of flour and semolina to the non-subsidised bakers from August 19,” after which they committed to “respect the laws on the production and sale of bread”, the commerce ministry said in a statement.

Economists attribute the bread shortage partly to speculation but, more broadly, to the lack of cereals. Tunisia’s debt is around 80 per cent of gross domestic product and the country lacks liquidity. It is unable to buy enough grain on global markets, economists say.

Around 200 bakers in the capital Tunis held a sit-in after the subsidy cut, and then authorities also disrupted the supply of regular flour.

Another such protest planned for Monday in Tunis has been cancelled after the government’s latest announcement, Salem Badri, president of the Association of Modern Bakeries in the coastal city of Sfax, told AFP.

Ninety per cent of the 1,443 association members, which employed almost 20,000 people, “had to close their doors” as a result of the earlier decision, Badri said, which made bread queues even longer at the other, state-supported outlets.

He said that, beginning Monday, discussions would continue with authorities to allow the modern bakeries to resume production of subsidised bread, but “on the basis of criteria set by President Kais Saied”.

Saied staged a power grab in July 2021 and has since ruled by decree in what his opponents call a “coup”. Last year he rammed through a constitution giving his office unlimited powers and neutering parliament.

In the early 1980s riots over bread killed a total of 150 people in Tunisia.

DUBAI — More than four million Yemenis will receive less food assistance as a result of funding shortages, compounding one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, the UN's food agency warned Friday.

The World Food Programme said "a deeper funding crisis for its Yemen operations from the end of September onward... will force WFP to make difficult decisions about further cuts to our food assistance programmes across the country in the coming months".

Without new funding, it expects more than four million people will receive less food assistance, many of them women and children already suffering from some of the highest malnutrition rates in the world.

With major cuts announced across different programmes, the actual number of people affected could be higher.

“We are confronted with the incredibly tough reality of making decisions to take food from the hungry to feed the starving,” said Richard Ragan, WFP’s Yemen representative.

The UN agency was “fully cognisant of the suffering these cuts will cause”, he said in a statement.

Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country, is already in the grips of one of the planet’s worst humanitarian crises after eight years of war, according to the United Nations.

The conflict broke out in 2014 when Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized the capital Sanaa, prompting a Saudi-led coalition to intervene the following year to prop up the internationally recognised government.

Although fighting has remained largely on hold since a six-month truce expired in October, the United Nations says current hunger levels are unprecedented.

Seventeen million Yemenis are experiencing food insecurity, and one million women and 2.2 million children under five require treatment for acute malnutrition, the UN says.

For the next six months, WFP said it requires $1.05 billion in funding, only 28 per cent of which has been secured.

“Yemen will remain one of WFP’s largest food assistance operations, but these cuts represent a significant reduction to the agency’s programmes in the country,” it said.

“The funding shortages are happening at a time of more people becoming severely malnourished.”

The World Food Programme was forced to slash food aid for 13 million Yemenis by more than 50 per cent in June last year because of a funding squeeze.

HUWARA, Palestinian Territories — Two Israelis were killed in a suspected shooting in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, the army and medics said, the latest deaths in an upsurge of bloodshed in the territory.

"A suspected shooting attack was carried out at a number of Israeli civilians in the area of the town of Huwara," an army statement said, adding that two civilians had been killed.

In a statement, the Magen David Adom emergency service said it had been called to a car wash in the Palestinian town of Huwara shortly after 3:00pm (1200 GMT).

An AFP correspondent saw streaks of blood on the floor of the car wash, as Israeli forces and soldiers gathered at the scene.

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that the army had closed key entrances to the main northern West Bank city of Nablus, and that soldiers were forcing businesses to close as they searched for the suspected attackers.

Hamas spokesman Abdul Latif Al Qanou said the attack was the “result of the resistance’s continuous promise to defend our people and respond to the crimes of the occupation”.

Earlier on Saturday, a Palestinian died from wounds sustained during an Israeli raid on the Balata refugee camp near Nablus earlier this week.

On Thursday, Israeli troops killed a Palestinian militant during a raid in Jenin, also in the northern West Bank.

At least 218 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces this year.