Region

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel has arrested one of the pallbearers of slain Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, occupation authorities said on Thursday, but rejected his lawyer's claim that the detention was linked to his role at the funeral.

In a raid that has sparked international outrage, baton-wielding Israeli troops beat several pallbearers as they carried the journalist's coffin out of a hospital in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.

Abu Akleh was shot dead during an Israeli army raid in the West Bank last week.

Palestinians and the TV network said Israeli troops killed her, while Israel said she may have been killed by Palestinian gunfire or a stray shot from an Israeli sniper.

A lawyer for pallbearer Amro Abu Khudeir told AFP that his client had been arrested and questioned over his role at the funeral.

According to the lawyer, Khaldoun Najm, Israel also claimed to have "a secret file on [Khudeir's] membership of a terrorist organisation".

"I think they will arrest more young men who participated in the funeral," Najm said.

"For them, the subject of the funeral and the coffin was scandalous."

Police dismissed any link between the funeral and Khudeir's arrest.

"We are witnessing an attempt to produce a conspiracy that is fundamentally incorrect," a statement said.

"The suspect was arrested as part of an ongoing investigation which contrary to allegations, had nothing to do with his participation in the funeral procession."

Occupation authorities justifications for the raid at St. Joseph's hospital have varied.

They have cited the need to stamp out "nationalistic" chants and also said that "rioters" among the mourners hurled projectiles at officers.

Israeli forces frequently crack down on displays of Palestinian identity, including the national flag, one of which was draped over Abu Akleh's coffin.

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — Hamas supporters celebrated on Thursday a landslide student election win at a top West Bank university, results experts said further point to the Islamists’ growing support in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Hamas’s Al Wafaa’ Islamic bloc won 28 of the 51 seats on the student council at Birzeit University, marking the first time Islamist-aligned candidates have gained control of the body.

The bloc aligned with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas’ secular Fateh movement won just 18 seats.

Students paraded Hamas’ green flag across campus, as crowds of young men bellowed chants more often heard in the Gaza Strip, a separate Palestinian enclave controlled by the Islamist group.

“Our victory in these elections confirms the support [for Hamas] of the Palestinian people,” Osaid Qaddoumi, one of the bloc’s candidates told AFP, echoing statements made by Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief in Gaza.

The general Palestinian population has not been to the polls since 2006.

Abbas scrapped elections scheduled for last year citing Israel’s refusal to allow voting in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as their capital.

But Palestinian analysts said Abbas baulked out of fears Hamas would also trounce Fateh across the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 June war.

Birzeit’s vice president, Ghassan Al Khatib, said some saw the campus vote as “a test for measuring public opinion”, with no general elections on the horizon.

Hugh Lovatt, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the Birzeit polls were perceived as a type of bellwether.

The make-up of the student body was “seen as more representative of Palestinian and the voter pool is seen to be representative of Palestinian dynamics — that’s why it matters”, he told AFP.

Fateh, which dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA) that rules the West Bank, used to dominate student councils in the territory.

Aref Jafal, a political analyst, said the results were as much about students wanting to “punish the Fateh movement... for its poor performance”.

He noted the PA’s poor handling of a recent teacher’s strike, as well as the death of prominent rights activist Nizar Bannat in Palestinian custody.

Hamas praised the results as “a rejection of the normalisation” and “security coordination”, in a reference to the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority’s ties with Israel.

Hamas official Fathi Hammad said: “The student movement has proven that [the youth] is the fuel to the revolution.”

KFEIR, Lebanon — When Firas Hamdan was injured at a protest near Lebanon’s parliament two years ago, the then activist never imagined he would one day return as a lawmaker.

Hamdan, one of 13 independent politicians who emerged from a mass anti-government protest movement in 2019, made it to parliament on a reformist platform at elections on Sunday.

The 35-year-old lawyer and another independent, Elias Jarade, both snatched seats from allies of the powerful Iran-backed Hizbollah in one of its south Lebanon strongholds, a first in three decades.

It was a breakthrough at the first election since the Mediterranean country was plunged into a deep economic crisis that has stoked popular fury with the hereditary and graft-tainted ruling class.

“To those who protested and clashed with authorities, those who were beaten by security forces, I say: ‘Today one of those victims is in parliament,’” Hamdan told AFP.

Speaking at his family home in the village of Kfeir, he vowed to fight for the rights of ordinary Lebanese who have been left behind.

Hamdan was hit in the chest by a lead pellet in 2020 during a demonstration near parliament, days after a deadly explosion struck Beirut’s port.

At the time, rights groups said security forces and men dressed in civilian clothing fired rubber-tipped bullets and tear gas canisters into the crowd.

But on Tuesday after the election results came in, jubilation was in the air as exhausted friends gathered in his backyard to celebrate.

Youths aspiring for change in Lebanon have rejoiced at the victories of Hamdan and Jarade.

Hamdan won against unpopular banker Marwan Kheireddine, while Jarade nabbed a seat held since 1992 by pro-Syrian regime politician Assaad Hardan.

Political lineage 

In 2019 Hamdan was among hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who protested against the entrenched ruling class, widely blamed for the country’s economic collapse.

“We fought against an alliance of banks and the political class... to show there is an opposition in the south, to break the political hegemony imposed on us, and we succeeded,” he said.

A dashing young man and an eloquent speaker, Hamdan hopes he will be able to pave the way for a new style of politics in Lebanon.

But the road ahead is strewn with difficulties in a country where the system favours sectarian allegiances and power is often inherited.

“We want to build a nation where there is rule of law... to restore people’s confidence in the country so that it does not remain a place of death and migration,” he said.

An economic meltdown has pushed many middle-class Lebanese to emigrate in search of a better future.

Some of Lebanon’s most disadvantaged people have tried to reach Europe on rickety boats, a treacherous and often deadly route.

Hamdan’s father Ismael, a former brigadier general, said he was proud of his “self-made” son.

“Officials must understand that change has begun,” he said, standing in front of a large portrait of himself in military uniform.

A few kilometres away in the village of Ibl Al Saqi, Jarade’s family welcomed well-wishers who filled the house with bouquets of flowers and cheerful chatter.

But the newly elected MP, also an eye surgeon, was busy tending to patients in Beirut.

 ‘Drowning’ 

Jarade’s friends and family who gathered in his living room lavished him with praise.

“We voted [for independents] like we were clinging to a piece of wood to keep us from drowning,” said retired teacher Ibrahim Rizk, as he sipped on his coffee.

A Harvard university graduate with a passion for farming, Jarade is well-liked in his community because he is seen as humble.

When he is not working the land and raising poultry and fish in his farm, the surgeon spends time tending to patients between Lebanon and Dubai.

“Many people asked me: ‘You’re a famous doctor and an honest man, what are you doing?’ as if decent professionals had no place in politics.”

The soft-spoken surgeon said he hoped to break that stereotype.

In a country rife with nepotism and corruption, he said “officials should make a decent living from their hard work”.

The father-of-two intends to pursue his political career with the same passion he has for farming and medicine.

“We are a dynamic movement, we are a revolution... We tell everyone: ‘liberate yourselves’,” he said.

Jarade said he is aware that he will face challenges.

“We may not be a life raft, but we will create a glimmer of hope for the future... to build the Lebanon that we dream of.”

CHIBAYISH, Iraq — Iraq’s vast swamplands are the reputed home of the biblical Garden of Eden, but the waterways are drying out and becoming so clogged with waste their very existence is at risk, activists warn.

“For 6,000 or 7,000 years the inhabitants have protected the marshes,” said Raad Al Assadi, director of Chibayish Organisation for Ecotourism, who this week began work on a boat to try to clear some of the worst areas of trash.

“But we have reached a stage where the marshes are threatened with extinction.”

The swamps, nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, are one of the world’s largest inland deltas.

The wetlands barely survived the wrath of dictator Saddam Hussein, who ordered they be drained in 1991 as punishment for communities protecting insurgents and to hunt them down.

But after Saddam was toppled, Iraq pledged to preserve the ecosystem and provide functional services to the marshland communities, and they were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016 both for their biodiversity and their ancient history.

Tourists have returned, but one of the main visible sources of pollution in the area are visitors who throw away their “plastic waste”, said Assadi.

‘Respect our land’ 

After decades of brutal war, Iraq lacks structures for the collection and disposal of waste, and 70 per cent of its industrial waste is dumped directly into rivers or the sea, according to data compiled by the United Nations and academics.

A team of 10 joins the boat, cruising the maze of narrow waterways to collect the piles of plastic bottles filling the channels, and erecting signs urging people to “respect our land”, and not to litter.

But it is far from the only threat: Iraq’s host of environmental problems, including drought and desertification, threaten access to water and livelihoods across the country.

The UN classifies Iraq “as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world” to climate change, having already witnessed record low rainfall and high temperatures in recent years.

The water level of the marsh is falling, a phenomenon accentuated by repeated droughts and by the dams built upstream of the two rivers, among Iraq’s upstream neighbours, Turkey and Iran.

“There is a threat to this ecosystem, which has significant biodiversity,” said French Ambassador Eric Chevallier, at the launch on Thursday of the French-funded boat project.

Chevallier called for “much greater mobilisation, Iraqi and international, to meet all the challenges” that a heating planet is causing.

A string of sandstorms in recent weeks have blanketed Iraq, with thousands needing medical care due to respiratory problems.

The Middle East has always been battered by dust and sandstorms, but they have become more frequent and intense in recent years.

The trend has been associated with overuse of river water, more dams, overgrasing and deforestation.

The rubbish collectors are not the only unusual team in the marshes: Earlier this year, the Iraqi Green Climate Organisation launched a veterinary ambulance to help farmers treat their water buffalo.

BEIRUT — Hizbollah’s opponents might rejoice at their loss of majority in parliament but Lebanon’s packed political calendar now sets the stage for protracted deadlocks at best or violence at worst.

Sunday’s polls passed without any major incident, in itself an achievement in a country which has a history of political violence and is suffering its worst crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.

Iran-backed Hizbollah is a major political and military force, described by its supporters a bulwark against enemy Israel and by its detractors as a state within a state whose continued existence prevents any kind of democratic change in Lebanon.

Hizbollah and its allies lost the clear majority they had in the outgoing parliament, despite a flurry of televised addresses by the Shiite group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in the week running up to the vote.

The biggest winners were the Christian Lebanese Forces party and new faces born of a 2019 secular protest movement, all of whom have a clear stance against Hizbollah.

“Old guard parties will seek to assert their political dominance in the face of the reformists who have entered parliament for the first time,” said analyst Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House.

Speaker election

As of May 22, after the current assembly’s mandate expires, the new lawmakers will have 15 days to pick a speaker, a position Nabih Berri has held since 1992 and is not intent on leaving despite reaching the age of 84.

By convention, Lebanon’s prime minister position is reserved for a Sunni Muslim, the presidency goes to a Maronite Christian and the post of speaker to a Shiite Muslim.

Berri is a deeply polarising figure but all Shiite seats in parliament were won by Hizbollah and the veteran speaker’s own Amal Party, which rules out the emergence of a consensual candidacy.

The election will be a first test of how willing Hizbollah’s opponents are to challenge the Shiite tandem.

The leader of the Tehran-backed movement’s parliamentary group set the tone as early as Monday when he warned rivals against becoming “shields for the Israelis”.

His words were a reply to Samir Geagea, whose Lebanese Forces have championed the case for disarming Hizbollah, and had laid down the gauntlet by vowing never to support Berri’s reelection or join a unity government.

The new polarisation of Lebanese politics raises fears of a repeat of deadly violence that broke out in Beirut last year between Hizbollah-aligned fighters and FL supporters.

The L’Orient-Le Jour daily stressed in an analysis that Hizbollah’s parliament majority in recent years had enabled it “not to resort to terror to impose its decisions and preserve its red lines”.

Government formation

“The risk of a total stalemate is real, deadlocks are a Lebanese speciality,” said Daniel Meier, a France-based researcher.

In Lebanon’s unique and chaotic brand of sectarian consensus politics, forming a government can take months, even when the country faces multiple emergencies.

Between the two latest elections, two out of four years were spent under a caretaker government with limited powers as the country’s political barons haggled over cabinet line-ups.

The latest government, led by billionaire Najib Mikati, has only been in place since September 2021 after a 13-month vacuum.

It was billed a mostly technocratic government tasked with guiding Lebanon to recovery, but each minister was endorsed by one of Lebanon’s perennial heavyweights.

Whether any of the 13 MPs labelled as representing the interests of the 2019 anti-establishment uprising would consider joining a coalition government with that same establishment is doubtful.

“There is change in the balance of power but this will not translate in a   for change because despite everything Hizbollah keeps its veto power,” analyst Sami Nader said.

A quick fix would be to keep the Mikati government in a caretaker capacity until the presidential election.

Presidential election

That is the last but not the least of the major hurdles in the institutional calendar.

Due by the end of the year, the new parliament’s pick for a president to succeed Michel Aoun, who will be 89 by then, was further complicated by the latest election.

He groomed his son-in-law Gebran Bassil for years but the electoral surge of the Lebanese Forces, the Christian rivals of Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, is a spanner in the family works.

Army chief Joseph Aoun has already been tipped as an alternative but talks could drag on.

“Probably we will have a long period of stalemate in the parliament,” said Joseph Bahout, a professor at the American University of Beirut.

He predicted a tunnel of institutional deadlocks could delay reforms requested by the International Monetary Fund for a critically needed rescue package until the spring of 2023.

BAGHDAD — Violence and sluggish reconstruction have prevented the return to Iraq’s north-western town of Sinjar of its predominantly Yazidi population after the abuses of extremist rule, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said on Wednesday.

Five years after the defeat of the Daesh group, which committed massacres against the Yazidis and used their women as sex slaves, the town’s Yazidi, Muslim Kurdish and Arab residents are no closer to returning home, especially after a surge in violence earlier this month.

The aid group said that “nearly two-thirds of Sinjar’s population — over 193,000 Yazidis, Arabs, and Kurds — remain displaced”.

The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking minority who were persecuted by Daesh for their non-Muslim faith after its capture of the town in 2014.

“Widespread destruction of civilian houses, new clashes, and social tensions” are preventing returns, NRC said in a report.

Out of 1,500 people surveyed by the aid group to determine how decisions to return home are made, about 64 per cent “said their homes were heavily damaged”.

“A staggering 99 per cent of those who applied for government compensation had not received any funding for damaged property,” it said.

“Families from Sinjar remain in displacement, with thousands still living in camps,” NRC’s country director for Iraq, James Munn, said. 

“We need durable solutions put in place so Iraqi families can once again start living their lives and plan for a safer future.”

The aid group called on the Iraqi government and the authorities in the autonomous Kurdistan region to “prioritise the rehabilitation of infrastructure and the restoration of services to allow for safe housing, land, and property, alongside public infrastructure”.

Some “80 per cent of public infrastructure and 70 per cent of civilian homes in Sinjar were destroyed” during the conflict years ago, the NRC said.

In early May, fighting broke out between Iraqi troops and Yazidi fighters affiliated with Turkey’s banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), killing at least one Iraqi soldier.

The Iraqi army was seeking to apply an agreement between Baghdad and the Kurdistan region for the withdrawal of Yazidi and PKK fighters from Sinjar.

More than 10,000 people fled the latest fighting, adding to the population of displaced.