Region

CAIRO — Four French and one Belgian were among 10 people killed in a bus crash on Wednesday in Egypt, whose tourism industry is only just emerging from a decade of political upheaval and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fourteen others — eight French and six Belgians — were taken to hospital with "broken bones, bruises and superficial injuries", but all were in a stable condition, the governor of the southern province of Aswan said.

The other five people killed were all Egyptian.

The Belgian foreign ministry confirmed to AFP that one of its citizens died and others were injured.

The accident occurred in early morning when the bus collided with a pick-up as it was transporting the tourists on the 300 kilometre (road journey between Aswan and the famed Abu Simbel temple further south.

An AFP photographer saw what remained of the burnt-out vehicles lying by the roadside.

Crashes are relatively common in Egypt, where many roads are in disrepair and traffic regulations frequently ignored.

Some 7,000 people died in road accidents in the country in 2020, according to official figures.

Vital tourism industry 

The Abu Simbel Temple was moved from its original location in the 1960s under the rule of president Gamal Abdel Nasser to make way for the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

Egypt had begun reviving its vital tourism industry by promoting its ancient heritage, after the country's 2011 revolution and ensuing unrest struck the sector.

But the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the subsequent global travel bans resulted in a plunge in tourism revenues to $4 billion, from $13 billion the previous year.

The sector employs some 2 million people in a coun try of 103 million and generates more than 10 per cent of GDP.

In August 2021 Russia resumed flights to Egyptian resorts, six years after a Russian airliner crashed after taking off from Sharm El Sheikh, killing all 224 people on board.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has yet again cut off much of the flow of tourists to Egypt, as the two countries accounted for about 40 per cent of visitors prior to the war.

The current administration of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi has invested heavily in promoting tourism, and has organised major events in a bid to attract visitors.

Last year, the North African country staged a procession of floats carrying the mummified remains of 22 pharaohs, including Egypt’s most powerful ancient queen, to a new resting place in Cairo.

Since the start of April, visitors from dozens of additional countries have been permitted to obtain visas on arrival to Egypt, rather than applying in advance.

While attacks on tourists have largely ceased since they peaked in the 1990s, deadly incidents have occurred.

In September 2015, eight Mexicans were mistakenly killed by security forces in the vast Western Desert.

And in February 2019, a German woman and two Egyptian children were killed when a building collapsed in a residential neighbourhood of the southern city of Luxor.

JENIN, Palestinian Territories — Armed with M16 rifles and encrypted messaging apps, Palestinians are resisting Israeli forces in Jenin, the West Bank home of the gunman behind last week's deadly Tel Aviv shooting rampage.

Heaps of car tyres are piled high, to be turned into burning road barricades next time the Israeli forces jeeps roll in for another incursion into this long-time bastion of resistance to occupation.

"Who are you?" Khaled asks a visiting AFP team through his car window, while on guard duty outside the flashpoint Jenin refugee camp. "What are you doing here? Are you Israelis?"

His job is to be on the lookout outside the town of 13,000 for Israeli forces, and pass on any sightings to the heavily armed fighters hidden deep within the camp, a concrete maze of narrow alleyways.

After Israel has suffered a three-week wave of attacks that has claimed 14 lives and appalled the nation, its army has focused its response on this restive camp since Saturday.

But Jenin is determined to resist.

Israel's aim is to apprehend relatives and supporters of the 28-year-old Tel Aviv shooter, Raad Hazem.

Huge images celebrating Hazem — who was shot dead after a massive manhunt — adorn the walls. Sometimes, they are plastered over yellowing pictures of "martyrs" since the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, of the early 2000s.

Since the Tel Aviv attack, seven young Palestinians from Jenin, including armed fighters, have been killed in Israeli raids.

If Israel, bereaved by the attacks on its soil, has "gone on the offensive", as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett vowed, then the fighters of Jenin are orchestrating a defence of their own.

Fear of covert units 

"We're here defending all of Jenin, all of its villages," said another guard, who did not give his name to avoid being targeted by Israel.

"If there's any problem, if the army is coming in, on Telegram you'll get a message — 'the army is in this area, in that area' — and we gather to defend our country," he said.

Another guard, who used the pseudonym Mohammed, said "we try to identify unknown cars and strangers, and relay this information on Telegram.”

"We are afraid of the mistaravim — Israeli units who pretend to be people from our country, who speak Arabic and dress like us. We fear they will be admitted to Telegram groups and share false information."

Over the past few days, the Israeli security services have demanded that the father of Hazem surrender, threatening a larger operation if he doesn't.

On Sunday, soldiers opened fire on the car of the gunman's brother, Hamam Fathi Hazem.

Since then, Hazem's father has gone into hiding.

Hamam is also in hiding, but he gets out on occasion, to drive the camp's narrow streets in a battered car that is decorated with posters of his late brother.

"Sometimes I hide, sometimes I go out. If the Israelis catch me it will be God's will," he whispered, pointing to a bullet hole in his car from a near-miss at the weekend.

'Martyr, prisoner 

or disabled' 

Modern weapons circulate widely in the camp, and the fighters are ready for battle, says a masked spokesman of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, a faction affiliated to the Fatah movement, and whose movement coexists with the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

M16s and similar assault rifles looted from Israeli supplies trade for around 15,000 euros ($16,200) here.

"The combat units are deployed in the streets and alleys of the camp," the spokesman said. "The camp is full of weapons.”

"We confirm our commitment inside the camp to repel this occupation through all means and all combat tactics," he added, a checked keffiyeh scarf across his face and an automatic weapon in his hand.

Jenin has seen intense battles before. In April 2002, bloody urban warfare with Israeli forces left dozens dead and much of the camp reduced to rubble.

Twenty years later "nothing has changed" for the young people here, said Ahmed Tobasi, director of a performance space in the camp, the Freedom Theatre.

"There is a constant state of frustration", said the 37-year-old, who lost many friends in the 2002 siege.

"I'm not married, and today I'm thinking about whether I want to bring children into this," he said.

"Today, as a child in Jenin camp, you grow up knowing my future is limited to three choices: Become a martyr, a prisoner or disabled".

By Guillaume Lavallee and Gareth Browne

NAIROBI — Millions of people in Somalia are at risk of famine, with young children the most vulnerable to the worsening drought, UN agencies said on Tuesday, warning that the troubled nation is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

Many parts of Somalia are being ravaged by an extreme months-long drought that has also taken hold in other countries in the region including Ethiopia and Kenya, destroying crops and livestock and driving huge numbers of people from their homes.

“Somalia is facing famine conditions as a perfect storm of poor rain, skyrocketing food prices and huge funding shortfalls leaves almost 40 per cent of Somalis on the brink,” the World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), humanitarian agency OCHA and the United Nations Children’s Fund said in a joint statement.

“We are literally about to start taking food from the hungry to feed the starving,” WFP Somalia country director El-Khidir Daloum said in the statement, describing the nation as “on the cusp of a humanitarian catastrophe”.

Six million Somalis or 40 per cent of the population are now facing extreme levels of food insecurity, according to a new report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, almost a two-fold increase since the beginning of the year, the agencies said.

About 1.4 million children face acute malnutrition through the end of the year, with around one quarter facing severe acute malnutrition, they said.

Children under the age of five are the most vulnerable, with access to food and milk scarce because of rising commodity prices and livestock issues.

Six areas have been identified as “at risk of famine, that are at risk of going down that route of 2011 if we don’t act now”, Lara Fossi, deputy country director for WFP Somalia, told a press conference in Geneva.

She was referring to Somalia’s devastating 2011 famine, which saw 260,000 people — half of them children under the age of six — die of hunger or hunger-related disorders.

Fossi said there were “huge surges” of people moving across the country in search of humanitarian assistance.

The Norwegian Refugee Agency said 745,000 people had been forced from their homes because of the drought that followed three failed rainy seasons, citing figures from the UN refugee agency.

The UN statement said that together, humanitarian agencies had been able to reach almost 2 million people but warned of a “critical gap” in donor funding, with a 2022 plan seeking $1.5 billion reaching only 4.4 per cent of the target.

Etienne Peterschmitt, the FAO representative in Somalia, said attention had been diverted by the war in Ukraine that has also driven up prices of food and fuel.

The NRC noted that almost all of Somalia’s wheat comes from Ukraine or Russia, with prices already spiking for wheat, sugar and oil in parts of the country.

Natural disasters — not conflict — have in recent years been the main drivers of displacement in Somalia, a war-torn nation that ranks among the world’s most vulnerable to climate change.

The country is also in the grip of a political crisis over long-delayed elections and has been battling an insurgency by the Al Shabaab Islamist extremist group for more than a decade.

JENIN, Palestinian Territories — Israeli forces launched a third day of operations on Monday around the flashpoint West Bank city of Jenin following heavy gun battles in recent days and overnight arrests, the forces said.

Tensions have soared since a spree of attacks in Israel left 14 people dead in the past three weeks, with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warning Israel is now "on the offensive".

The Israeli forces said 14 Palestinians were arrested early Monday, a day after four Palestinians were killed in separate incidents in the occupied territory.

An additional 13 Israeli forces battalions were now operating in the West Bank, said an Israeli forces source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In Jenin, thousands of mourners flooded the streets, many carrying Palestinian flags or rifles, for the funeral of Mohamed Zakarneh, 17, who according to the Wafa news agency died of gunshot wounds overnight.

“The resistance is in direct confrontation with the occupation and any minute we must expect a total clash,” said Ziad Al Nakhala, secretary general of the Islamic Jihad movement, in a statement.

“Jenin must not be isolated, no matter the cost.”

The Israeli forces said it operated nearby Monday, in Burqa and Qallil in the northern West Bank, as well as in Al Aroub and Hebron in the south.

“Violent riots were instigated by dozens of Palestinians” near Nablus, the forces said, while the Palestine Red Crescent said 24 Palestinians were wounded in the Nablus area overnight.

Jenin, as well as Bethlehem in the southern West Bank, declared general strikes, shuttering shops, offices and official institutions.

Weeks of violence 

Tensions have surged during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, nearly a year after violence flared in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, leading to 11 days of war.

A total of 14 people in Israel have been killed in four attacks since March 22, including a shooting spree in Bnei Brak, an Orthodox Jewish city in greater Tel Aviv, carried out by a Palestinian from Jenin.

Over the same period, at least 14 Palestinians have been killed, including assailants, according to a count by AFP.

Two of them were women shot dead on Sunday — one after stabbing and lightly wounding an officer in Hebron, the other when she failed to stop at a checkpoint near Bethlehem.

Islamic Jihad has been growing in strength and capability both in Gaza and the West Bank, and especially in Jenin.

Wrong turn 

Israeli forces were targeting relatives of Raad Hazem, the 28-year-old Jenin man who last Thursday killed three Israeli civilians and wounded 12 at a Tel Aviv bar before he was shot dead following a manhunt.

The Israeli forces demanded the father hand himself in, ahead of the planned demolition of the family home. It said it had engaged in an exchange of gunfire involving the assailant’s family members on Sunday — the clash in which 17-year-old Zakarneh was killed.

Another Palestinian from the Bethlehem area was shot dead on Sunday after hurling a Molotov cocktail at an Israeli vehicle, the Israeli forces told AFP.

In another incident overnight, two Israelis were shot and wounded after entering Nablus, where the previous night Joseph’s tomb, a religious site, had been vandalised by Palestinians.

“A group of Israeli civilians entered into the city after breaking through an unmanned military checkpoint,” said an army statement.

Shortly after, it said, the two Israeli men emerged at another checkpoint “with gunshot wounds”.

One of the men involved told public broadcaster Kan they had gone to inspect Joseph’s tomb.

“We were done and heading back to Jerusalem but then we took a wrong turn,” and were shot,” he said.