Region

ISTANBUL — A 5.6 magnitude earthquake hit eastern Turkey on Monday, killing one person and wounding dozens others while causing some damaged buildings to collapse, the government's disaster agency said.

The epicentre of the tremor was the Yesilyurt district in the Malatya province, which was hit by the February 6 earthquake that killed over 44,000 people in Turkey and thousands more in neighbouring Syria.

"One citizen lost his life. Some 69 were injured," Yunus Sezer, chairman of AFAD disaster agency, said in televised comments.

AFAD tweeted that 29 buildings already damaged by a powerful February 6 earthquake had collapsed.

"Our search and rescue teams were quickly dispatched to the region, and started to work," it added.

The local mayor, Mehmet Cinar, said a father and his daughter were trapped after they entered a damaged building to get their belongings, Turkish media reported.

Television images showed the man being carried on a stretcher into an ambulance, while rescue teams were trying to make contact with his daughter inside the damaged building.

Turkish authorities have expanded a criminal probe into individuals responsible for buildings levelled by the deadly earthquake that left millions without homes.

AFAD recorded almost 10,000 aftershocks after the February 6 quake. Some 173,000 buildings are believed to have sustained damage according to local media reports.

Turkish media has vocally criticised developers for using shoddy materials and failing to comply with construction codes.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced plans to rebuild 270,000 homes in the devastated provinces within one year.

KALMA, Sudan — In Sudan’s sprawling Kalma camp for the displaced, Ansaf Omar lives with the gut-wrenching guilt of losing her toddler to a food crisis that has hit millions of people nationwide.

“I am severely malnourished so I couldn’t breastfeed him,” said Omar, 34, a month after her one-and-half-year-old child died in Kalma camp just outside Nyala, the provincial capital of South Darfur state.

“I took him everywhere — hospitals, treatment centres, but he died in the end,” she said.

Desperate mothers like Omar battle daily around Kalma to feed their frail and hungry children, many of whom are severely malnourished.

Sudan is one of the world’s poorest countries, with one-third of the population — at least 15 million people — facing a growing hunger crisis, according to United Nations figures.

Nearly 3 million of Sudan’s children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, the UN says.

“Over 100,000 children in Sudan are at risk of dying of malnutrition if left untreated,” said Leni Kinzli, head of communications in the country for the World Food Programme (WFP).

Nationwide, one-third of children under five are “too short for their age”, and nearly half of Sudan’s 189 localities have a “stunting prevalence more significant than 40 per cent”, according to the Alight aid group.

It said that at least 63 children were reported to have died from causes related to malnutrition at Alight facilities in and around Kalma in 2022.

Sudan grappled with chronic hardships under the regime of Omar Al Bashir, who was ousted in 2019. His three-decade rule was marked by internal conflicts, government mismanagement and punishing international sanctions.

Bouts of violence 

The restive Darfur region was the scene of a bitter civil war that broke out in 2003, pitting ethnic African minority rebels against Bashir’s Arab-dominated government in Khartoum.

Economic troubles deepened following the COVID-19 pandemic and a 2021 military coup which derailed a post-Bashir transition and triggered cuts to crucial international aid.

Some 65 per cent of Sudan’s people live under the poverty line, according to a 2020 UN report.

Food insecurity is not new to the residents of Kalma, Darfur’s largest camp and home to some 120,000 people displaced since the 2003 conflict erupted in the country’s arid western region.

But residents say conditions have worsened as economic hardships kept rising and sporadic bouts of deadly violence continued.

Alight’s nutrition centres in Kalma saw a “dramatic increase on admissions to and demand on its emergency nutrition services” in 2022, according to the group’s country director, Heidi Diedrich.

“Kalma stabilisation centre newly admitted 863 children in 2022, an increase of 71 per cent from 2021,” according to Alight.

“The number of deaths at the stabilisation centre increased by 231 per cent in 2022, all children aged six months and above.”

Outside one nutrition centre in Kalma, 38-year-old Hawa Suleiman cradled her sleeping infant, hoping to find food for the child.

“We have nothing at home. We sometimes go to sleep hungry,” she said.

Lack of funding 

In recent years the WFP has halved food rations for internally displaced people in Kalma “due to funding constraints”, said Kinzli.

The lack of funding — in part due to global economic decline following COVID-19 and the Ukraine crisis — coupled with rising humanitarian needs puts the WFP in “an impossible situation where we have to choose who receives support and who does not — it’s heartbreaking”.

The UN has reported a 35 per cent deficiency in the production of sorghum — a staple food in Sudan — during the 2021-2022 harvest season.

Nouralsham Ibrahim, 30, says she could no longer rely on aid to feed her five children.

“We try to make some money working the fields outside the camp, but it barely covers one day,” she said.

“Even the bread is too expensive.”

For others like Omar, venturing out of the camp in the troubled Darfur region, where ethnic violence still breaks out sporadically, is risky and rarely worth it.

“We are not left in peace when we get out to work,” said the woman who makes just 500 Sudanese pounds ($0.85) a day when she works in the fields.

“Women and girls get raped... and men get killed.”

The Darfur conflict — which left 300,000 people killed and 2.5 million displaced — may have largely subsided but ethnic violence can still break out over access to water, land or cattle.

In 2022, clashes killed nearly 1,000 people in the country, including in the Darfur region, according to the UN.

“We are very tired,” said Ibrahim. “We scramble here and there to get food but we need help.”

NASIRIYAH — Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates rivers have witnessed a sharp decrease in their levels in the south of the country, officials said on Sunday, pledging to take urgent measures to ease water shortages.

In Nasiriyah, capital of the southern province of Dhi Qar, an AFP photographer saw the river bed of the mighty Euphrates dry in patches.

The water ministry blamed the situation in some southern provinces on “the low quantity of water reaching Iraq from neighbouring Turkey”.

“This has triggered a sharp drop in the country’s water reserves,” it said in a statement.

The Tigris and the Euphrates both have their source in Turkey, and authorities in Iraq have long accused the Ankara government of withholding water in dams that choke the rivers, dramatically reducing flows into Iraq.

Iraqi authorities also accuse farmers of abusing water supplies and flouting restrictions to irrigate their lands.

Water scarcity hitting farming and food security are already among the “main drivers of rural-to-urban migration” in Iraq, the UN and several non-government groups said in June 2022.

According to official Iraqi statistics from last year, the level of the Tigris entering Iraq has dropped to just 35 per cent of its average over the past century.

Water Ministry spokesman Khaled Chamal said Sunday that Iraq was getting only 30 per cent of the water it expected from the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Iraq regularly asks Turkey to release more water, and has imposed measures to ration water for agriculture and domestic use.

Water is also often held back in dams in Iraq’s north, triggering anger among residents in the south.

Chamal told AFP the latest drop in water levels in both the Tigris and Euphrates in the country’s south was “temporary”.

Authorities will increase levels by releasing water from Iraqi dams in the northern areas of Mosul, Dukan and Darbandikhan, he added.

“There should be positive results within the next two days,” he said.

After decades of conflict, oil-rich Iraq has been plagued by poverty, drought and desertification.

It is one of the five countries most exposed to impacts of climate change, according to the United Nations.

In December, the World Bank urged Iraqi authorities to modernise irrigation processes and farming methods, and review dam infrastructure.

NABLUS, Palestinian Territories — Palestinians posed for photos Friday at a new landmark, the rubble of a house that was the site of Israel's deadliest raid in the occupied West Bank for nearly two decades.

Eleven Palestinians were killed and more than 80 wounded by gunfire as Israeli soldiers raided Nablus in the broad daylight of Wednesday morning, in what the army said was an operation based on intelligence of an imminent threat from Palestinian fighters.

Only 48 hours later, a Palestinian family gathered to take snaps in the ruins of the house that has become a memorial among the ancient Ottoman mosques and cobbled streets of Nablus' Old City.

A sabre of light cut through a gaping chasm in the ceiling — an artificial porthole left by an Israeli rocket fired during the operation.

"How is it possible that... hundreds of soldiers armed with rifles and missiles enter an area inhabited by 200,000 unarmed civilians in order to arrest or kill a person?" asked Nasser Mahamadeh.

"The people here are all with the resistance, and these incidents make the resistance more powerful and make people turn more towards the resistance," the 57-year-old said as he surveyed the destruction.

"If there were 10 resistors before, now they will become 1,000 resistors, and so on."

A spokesperson for the Israeli military said that "about 150 personnel" were involved in Wednesday's raid.

Nablus' Old City has become a focal point of increased tension in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the emergence of a new militant group known as the Lions' Den last year.

Israel has accused the group of carrying out attacks on Israeli targets, including the killing in October of a soldier in the West Bank.

Wednesday's raid was just the latest in a string of deadly military operations in the West Bank which have seen scores of Palestinians killed.

'Lions' Den' 

In January, 10 Palestinians including militants and children were killed in a raid further north on Jenin refugee camp. Another five, alleged Hamas fighters, were killed in an operation in the Dead Sea city of Jericho.

Among the dead in Nablus on Wednesday was 72-year-old Adnan Abu Ashraf.

Outside his bolted shop, his cousin Umm Tayseer Al Asalia, 60, described how he did not return after he headed “to the municipality to complete some paperwork”.

“Killing the leaders of the resistance in Nablus does not weaken the resistance, but rather strengthens it, because there are always new youths joining the resistance,” she said.

Ameed Al Masri, a local Fateh official, said the fighters even had the support of the representatives of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ secular Fateh movement.

“The Lions’ Den is a group of young people from various factions who chose the struggle, independent of any faction,” he said.

“We in Fateh respect that. We are with anyone who wants to resist” the occupation, he added.

The Islamic Jihad said one of its commanders was also among those killed in Wednesday’s Israeli raid.

Yet while Israel’s military lauds its own efforts to fight the group, in the Old City, locals said that regardless of how many fighters they claimed to have killed, Nablus’ resistance had only hardened.

Asalia pointed to her eight-year-old grandson, Karim.

“He asked me to buy him a gun because he wanted to join the Lions’ Den and become hunted like the martyr Ibrahim Al Nabulsi,” she said, referring to the group’s late leader, as her shy grandchild scuttled away.

Surrounded by rubble, a furious Mahamadeh cleaned the dust off his boots.

“The Lions’ Den is an idea,” he said.

“This idea is now spreading to all of Palestine, and every person has become a resistance fighter.”

In a statement posted to the Telegram Internet channel late on Thursday, the Lions’ Den claimed that “nearly 50” more fighters had joined the group since Wednesday’s raid.

AFP was unable to confirm the authenticity of the statement.

TUNIS — A steady flow of taxis has rolled up outside the Ivorian embassy in Tunis in recent days, depositing dozens of migrants who say they no longer feel safe amid an officially sanctioned climate of fear.

After a wave of arrests in recent weeks, President Kais Saied gave a speech on Tuesday that critics said was openly racist.

Many Sub-Saharan Africans in Tunisia are now heading for the exit.

"We want to go home," said Constant, who arrived at the embassy early on Friday in the hope of getting her paperwork in order.

In his speech Saied had ordered officials to take "urgent measures" to tackle irregular migration, claiming without evidence that "a criminal plot" was underway "to change Tunisia's demographic make-up".

His comments, praised by French far-right former presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, were seen by many as inciting violence against Sub-Saharan Africans living in Tunisia legally or illegally.

Aboubacar Dobe, head of a radio station for French-speaking migrants, said it was "clear that things are different since Saied's speech".

The head of Radio Libre Francophone said he had received threatening phone calls.

"When it was just the [recently created far-right] Tunisian Nationalist Party or on social media, people thought the state would protect them," he said.

"Now, they feel abandoned."

The African Union also expressed concern following Saied's remarks on migrants, calling on its member states to "refrain from racialised hate speech that could bring people to harm".

On Saturday, hundreds of protesters marched down Avenue Habib Bourguiba in central Tunis, chanting: "Down with fascism, Tunisia is an African country”.

"President of shame, apologise," they demanded of Saied.

Harassment 

and intimidation 

Outside the Ivorian embassy, one couple arrived after being evicted from their apartment, their worldly belongings in backpacks and suitcases.

Three other young women were dropped off by a smartly dressed Tunisian woman.

"They've been working at my beauty salon for two years," she said. "They're leaving now because they don't feel safe."

Constant, who has been unemployed for six months, said she has set up a WhatsApp group for Ivorians wanting to go home.

"I'm here to organise an exit permit, because I've overstayed by four years and I can't afford to pay the fine" of more than 1,000 euros ($1,055), she said.

Other migrants spoke of harassment and intimidation, including fires lit outside their buildings or attempts to break in.

"The landlords are kicking us out; people beat us up or mistreat us," said Wilfrid Badia, 34, who has spent six years in the North African country eking out a living on casual jobs.

"To be safe, we decided to come to the embassy to sign up to go home."

Hosni Maati, a lawyer who helps an association for Ivorians in Tunisia, said that "since the president's speech, [Tunisians] have totally lost it".

Maati said Sub-Saharan Africans had been living without papers in Tunisia for years as authorities turned a blind eye.

Bureaucratic obstacles prevented many from regularising their status, making them easy targets for exploitation by unscrupulous employers as cheap labour.

'Mob justice' 

Authorities began a wave of arrests targeting migrants two weeks ago and have so far detained around 400 people, rights groups say. Most have since been released.

"You can't solve such a complex situation by making a speech and arresting people left, right and centre," Maati said.

Jean Bedel Gnabli, deputy head of an association for Sub-Saharan migrants, said the whole community — also including Senegalese, Guineans, Congolese and Comorans — was living in fear.

"They feel like they've been handed over to mob justice," he said.

Even sub-Saharan African students at Tunisian universities, who in principle are in the country legally, have been affected.

AESAT, an association that supports them, sent out a message this week urging them "not to go out, even to go to class, until authorities ensure we are properly protected from these attacks".

In the Bhar Lazreg neighbourhood of north Tunis, streets of informal African restaurants and barber shops have closed, apparently for good.

A creche that had taken care of dozens of African children was nowhere to be seen.

Ivorians Blede Dibe and Michel Yere worked manual jobs in the neighbourhood until they found themselves abruptly unemployed two weeks ago.

But they agreed there was little point in returning to their home country.

"Go back to do what? There's no work for us in Ivory Coast," they said in unison.

GAZA CITY — Israel launched air strikes on Gaza in return for alleged rocket fire from the Palestinian enclave Thursday, a day after the deadliest Israeli forces raid in the occupied West Bank in nearly 20 years.

Eleven Palestinians, including a 16-year-old, were killed and more than 80 wounded by gunfire on Wednesday, the Palestinian health ministry said, when Israeli forces raided the flashpoint West Bank city of Nablus, drawing international appeals for calm.

The death toll was the highest since the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, ended in 2005.

It was described as a "massacre" by top Palestinian official Hussein Al Sheikh, who called for "international protection for our people".

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who heads a new coalition government regarded as the most right-wing in Israel's history, praised Israeli forces and vowed to "hit terrorism hard" after the Israeli forces said they targeted suspected militants in Nablus.

The United States said it was "extremely concerned by the levels of violence" and called for a de-escalation. UN Middle East envoy Tor Wennesland travelled to the Gaza Strip on Thursday, his spokesman told AFP.

Before dawn on Thursday, Palestinian fighters fired rockets from Gaza at Israel and prompting air strikes by the army on multiple sites in the coastal enclave.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the rockets, after saying one of its commanders was killed in the Nablus raid.

The Israeli forces said they intercepted five rockets, while a sixth struck an uninhabited area.

Two hours later Israeli air strikes targeted a "weapons factory" and a "military camp" run by Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas, the army said, sending plumes of black smoke into the sky.

Following the cross-border fire, Netanyahu warned: "Whoever tries to attack us will pay the price".

Since December, the premier has led a coalition government alongside extreme-right allies who have been handed key powers in the West Bank.

UN chief Antonio Guterres said the “immediate priority must be to prevent further escalation”.

“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is at its most combustible in years,” he said.

The occupation forces said on Wednesday’s raid targeted three suspects implicated in West Bank shootings.

The Palestinian health ministry said those killed in Nablus were aged between 16 and 72.

Hours after the raid, the ministry announced the death of Anan Ennab, 66, from tear gas inhalation.

He had been in the market when the Israeli incursion began, his brother Allam Ennab said on Thursday.

“What happened yesterday in Nablus was a real massacre, like I’ve never seen before,” the 68-year-old told AFP.

Palestinian health officials said 82 people were hospitalised for gunshot wounds. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said its medics also treated 250 cases of tear gas inhalation.

The wounded include Palestine TV journalist Mohammed Al Khatib, who was shot in the hand, a colleague told AFP.

Hospital ‘covered in blood’ 

Talaat Ziada, the head of the intensive care unit in Nablus’s Rafidia hospital, said his youngest patient was an 11-year-old boy.

“It was a war zone in the Old City, and it was also a war zone here,” he told AFP.

“The corridors and stairs were covered in blood, and people were scrambling to check on their relatives.”

Palestinian shops were closed on Thursday in occupied East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank, including Nablus, after a general strike was called in protest at the violence.

The Lions’ Den, a Nablus-based militant group, said six of those killed were members of various Palestinian factions.

The Palestinian health ministry announced Thursday a 30-year-old man died from his wounds, after being shot earlier this month by Israeli forces in Jenin.

Since the start of this year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed the lives of 61 Palestinian adults and children, including militants and civilians.

Last year was the deadliest year in the territory since the United Nations started tracking casualties in 2005.