Region

Gaza — Gaza residents cowered indoors Monday as Israeli jets pounded the enclave, killing more than 200 people.

Before dawn, within just a few minutes, dozens of Israeli strikes bombarded the crowded Palestinian coastal strip controlled by Islamist group Hamas.

Flames lit up the sky as intense explosions shook Gaza City, sparking widespread power cuts and damaging hundreds of buildings, local authorities said.

Some 3,200 rockets have been fired by Palestinian resistance towards Israel since the conflict escalated on May 10 in the heaviest exchange of fire in years, sparked by unrest in Jerusalem.

On Monday morning, an AFP reporter in Gaza saw huge plumes of grey smoke billow from a mattress factory, as civil defence members aimed high-pressure water hoses at the blaze.

Later in the day, dust clouds rose near Gaza's Mediterranean port from further explosions, with Israeli forces confirming they had targeted "a Hamas submergible naval weapon".

West Gaza resident Mahdi Abed Rabbo, 39, expressed “horror and fear” at the intensity of the onslaught, saying: “There have never been strikes of this magnitude.”

Another Gaza resident, Mani Qazaat, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “should realise we’re civilians, not fighters”.

“I felt like I was dying,” he said about enduring a heavy aerial bombardment.

Thousands made homeless 

Israeli forces claimed on Monday they had hit the homes of nine “high-ranking” Hamas commanders, a day after bombing the house of Yahya Sinwar, head of the group’s political wing.

They gave no details of any casualties.

An Islamic Jihad commander was also killed on Monday, a source within the group and the Israeli forces said.

Fighter jets also hit what the Israeli forces call the “Metro”, the term for Hamas’ underground tunnels, which Israel has previously acknowledged runs in part through civilian areas.

The renewed strikes come a day after 42 Palestinians in Gaza — including at least eight children and two doctors, according to the health ministry — were killed in the worst daily death toll in the enclave since the bombardments began.

In total, 200 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including at least 59 children, and more than 1,300 wounded since Israel launched its air campaign against Gaza.

Islamic Jihad said it fired more rockets towards Tel Aviv, and air raids sirens wailed across Israel again on Monday, especially near the Gaza border

Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel’s campaign would “take time” to finish.

Israeli bombardment of Gaza has displaced 38,000 people and made 2,500 homeless, the United Nations says.

It has also battered crucial infrastructure, with the electricity authority on Monday warning it only had enough fuel left to provide power for another two to three days.

On Saturday, Israel gave journalists from Al Jazeera and AP news agency an hour to evacuate their offices before launching air strikes, turning their tower block into a pile of smoking rubble.

Netanyahu on Sunday said the building also hosted a Palestinian “terrorist” intelligence office and claimed it was a “perfectly legitimate target”.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Monday he had requested “details” and a “justification” for the strike.

The violence between Hamas and Israel is the worst since 2014, when Israel launched a military operation on the Gaza Strip with the stated aim of ending rocket fire and destroying tunnels used for smuggling.

The attack left 2,251 dead on the Palestinian side, mostly civilians.

Opening a session of the UN Security Council on the renewed violence on Sunday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the fighting “utterly appalling”.

But the UN talks, already delayed by Israel’s ally the United States, resulted in little action, with Washington opposing a resolution.

President Joe Biden’s administration says it is working behind the scenes, and that a Security Council statement could backfire.

US envoy for Israeli and Palestinian affairs Hady Amr was in Ramallah on Monday and met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who urged Washington to act against “Israel’s aggression”, the official Wafa news agency reported.

Israel is also trying to contain inter-communal violence between Jews and Arab-Israelis, as well unrest in the occupied West Bank, where Palestinian authorities say Israeli forces have killed 19 Palestinians since May 10.

A 56-year-old Israeli man who was beaten by Arab suspects in the city of Lod last week died in hospital on Monday, police said.

Clashes broke out at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque compound, one of Islam’s holiest sites, on May 7 after Israeli forces moved in on worshippers.

This followed a crackdown against protests over planned expulsions of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.

Guterres warned that the fighting could “unleash an uncontainable security and humanitarian crisis and... further foster extremism, not only in the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel, but in the region as a whole”.

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday sought to rally support for Sudan including debt relief at an international summit, praising the country as an "inspiration" in its transition after years of authoritarian rule

The French government promised to lend $1.5 billion (1.24 billion euros) to Sudan to help it pay off its massive foreign debt, as Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok pursues economic reforms while paying off bills of some $60 billion.

France wants the Sudan summit to send a signal about the help African countries can receive if they embrace democracy and turn their backs on authoritarianism.

Hamdok is pushing to rebuild a crippled economy and end the international isolation Sudan endured under former strongman Omar Al Bashir, whose three decades of rule were marked by sanctions and hardship.

"Despite the difficulties, considerable progress has been made since the fall of the old regime," Macron said in his opening address.

Hailing Sudan's transition as "an inspiration" and a "precedent", he said that the international community has "collective responsibility" to realise its goals.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said ahead of the summit that the $1.5 billion bridge loan would clear Sudan's arrears to the IMF.

"Rebuilding an attractive and resilient market takes time, but today I hope we will convince private investors that the fundamentals for business are fully there."

'Explore opportunities' 

Hamdok told AFP in Khartoum in the run-up to the meeting that he hopes Sudan can secure relief and investment deals at the Paris conference.

Sudan's debts to the Paris Club, which includes major creditor countries, is estimated to make up around 38 per cent of its total foreign debt.

"We are going to the Paris conference to let foreign investors explore the opportunities for investing in Sudan," Hamdok said. "We are not looking for grants or donations."

Macron praised the Sudan revolution that in 2019 ousted Bashir as "post-Islamist" and said it had been unique in the region.

"For the first time in the entire region, it put an end to a regime using the weapon of political Islam to cover up its mistakes and to divide its people," said Macron.

Sudan was taken off Washington’s blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism in December, removing a major hurdle to foreign investment. But many challenges persist.

Also attending will be President Sahle-Work Zewde of Ethiopia, whose country has been locked in a long dispute with Sudan over water resources that has sometimes threatened to erupt into open conflict.

Several heads of state are also in Paris to discuss investment in Sudan, as is International Monetary Fund  (IMF) Director Kristalina Georgieva, along with top European diplomats including EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell.

Africa summit 

On Tuesday, a Paris summit on African economies will try to fill a financing shortfall of almost $300 billion caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both meetings, held in a temporary exhibition centre near the Eiffel Tower, present a chance for Macron to show himself as a statesman on Africa whose influence goes beyond the continent’s Francophone regions.

The meetings will also mark a return to in-person top-level gatherings after the COVID-19 pandemic made video conferences the norm.

Among those attending both summits will be Rwandan President Paul Kagame in a rare visit to France as Paris presses for reconciliation with Kigali after a historic report made clear French failings over the 1994 genocide.

Africa has so far been less badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic than other global regions with a total of 130,000 dead across the continent.

But the economic cost is only too apparent, and Tuesday’s Africa summit will focus on making up the shortfall in the funds needed for future development,  a financial gap estimated by the IMF to amount to $290 billion up to 2023.

By Bachir El/Khoury
Agence France-Presse

BEKAA VALLEY, Lebanon — In a camp for Syrian refugees in east Lebanon, Mohammad and his three sisters fear they will be out of school for a third consecutive year because remote learning is out of reach.

"Look at my phone. How do you expect my son to study on it?" asked his father Abdel Nasser, sitting cross-legged inside the family's tent in the Bekaa Valley.

“The screen is cracked... and I have no internet.”

Eleven-year-old Mohammad and his siblings are among tens of thousands of Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian children who have been left for months without schooling due to coronavirus restrictions.

An accelerating economic crisis means they may never return to school in what rights groups are calling an “education catastrophe”, especially affecting refugees who already struggled to access learning before the pandemic.

“We can’t afford to buy a cellphone for everyone. We must first be able to feed our children,” said their mother Shamaa.

Mohammad arrived in Lebanon from Syria in 2012 — a year into an ongoing conflict that has killed 388,000 people and displaced millions.

But he wasn’t enrolled in school until 2019 because Lebanon’s public school system didn’t open its doors to Syrian refugees until 2013, and even then only to a limited number.

Mohammad’s first school year coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought all classes to a halt by the second term.

“He doesn’t even know how to multiply one by one,” his father said.

‘Hanging by a thread’ 

Mohammad’s older sisters Hind, Sarah and Amal, aged 12 to 14, had already been in school for four years when the education ministry in March 2020 said it was shifting to online learning.

“I was happy before,” 14-year-old Amal said, sobbing. “I was studying Arabic, English, science and geography.

“But now my parents can’t afford to give me an online education.”

More than 1.2 million children in Lebanon have been out of school since the country’s coronavirus outbreak began last year, the UK-based charity Save the Children says.

It warned last month that a large number of children may never get back into a classroom, either because they have already missed so much school or because their families can’t afford to enrol them.

“Education for thousands of children in Lebanon is hanging by a thread,” it said.

Lebanon’s economic crisis is at its worst since the 1975-1990 civil war, with more than half the local population now living in poverty.

Poverty rates are even higher among Syrians, with 90 per cent of families barely able to survive.

Lisa Abou Khaled of the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) says this is impacting education.

“Some Syrian children have had to give up their studies to work and help their families,” she told AFP.

Citing data from Lebanon’s education ministry, she said 25,000 Syrian students should have re-enrolled or entered grade one in 2020-2021 but did not.

“We think the real number is higher than that,” she added, estimating that more than half of Syrian school-aged children were currently out of the classroom.

‘Disgusted’ 

The education catastrophe is also real for the tens of thousands of Lebanese who have lost jobs or seen their income slashed since the economic crisis accelerated in 2019.

Inside a cramped apartment in the eastern Beirut suburb of Burj Hammoud, 11-year-old Pamela points to a keyboard — the only thing that remains from a desktop computer destroyed during last summer’s huge Beirut port explosion.

The August 4 blast, which killed more than 200 people and destroyed swaths of the capital, hit Pamela’s home and piled new misery on a family already brought to its knees by the financial downturn.

The family couldn’t afford to buy a replacement as it had become far too expensive due to the rapid devaluation of the Lebanese pound.

“So I started to follow lessons on my cellphone,” Pamela said.

As she has impaired vision, a small screen was already a nuisance.

But then power outages lasting up to 18 hours a day also left her struggling to keep her phone alive and connected to the internet.

She decided to drop out.

“I was disgusted with online education, I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said.

Her father, an out-of-work taxi driver, said he had wanted Pamela to drop out months ago.

“I don’t give a damn about education or this country,” he said.

But Pamela hasn’t entirely abandoned hopes of returning to school.

“I want to study so that I can get a decent job later and be able to help my parents.”

TEL AVIV — Arab-Israeli supermarket cashier Israa Jarbou has missed a week of work for fear of getting attacked by Jews on the bus out of Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish quarter of Tel Aviv.

“They’ll see I’m religious,” said the 27-year-old, who wears the Muslim hijab head covering. “There is no security.”

Living nearby, Jewish seminary student David Shvets, 24, voiced similar fears, saying local Arabs had pelted him with stones and that a nearby synagogue was torched.

“We now go in a large group with a police escort to get home at night ... in the heart of the state of Israel!” he said incredulously, describing the situation as a “jungle”.

Hostility has gripped usually quiet mixed communities of Israeli Jews and Arabs since the start of a full-blown military escalation a week ago pitting Israel’s army against the Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The most intense fighting since 2014 was sparked by unrest in Jerusalem, where Israeli riot police stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque and clashed with stone-throwing Palestinians.

Violence has flared nationwide between Jews and Arabs, a 20 per cent minority. Synagogues, mosques, graveyards, a theatre and restaurants have been targeted, and at least one man has died.

Now, in the Mediterranean seaside community of Jaffa, with its trendy bars and hummus restaurants, mounted police enforce nightly road closures, and officers with assault rifles patrol sidewalks.

A 12-year-old Muslim boy was hospitalised after a firebomb was thrown into his home, an attack that led to an unnamed suspect’s arrest on Monday. Fearful Muslim neighbours were quick to take down their Ramadan decorations.

The root causes for the latest spasm of violence go back decades. In Jaffa, an assault last month gave an early warning of long-simmering tensions over land and property rights.

‘They want to throw us out’ 

Israa Jarbou shares a cramped public housing apartment with nine others including her husband, their two children and her mother-in-law Etaf, 57.

Outside, where their chickens roam, they have seen vast changes in recent years. Low-income Arab neighbours are getting evicted as the housing blocks give way to luxury apartments that mostly Israeli Jews can afford.

The Jarbous, too, face an eviction threat from the state public housing company Amidar, which ordered them to move out in 2018, citing unpaid rent.

Lawyer Saar Amit told AFP he got that eviction cancelled and has requested the company allow the family to stay, or to pay reduced rent in another, citing Etaf Jarbou’s poor health and meagre income. Amidar has not yet replied.

In mid-April, when two men from the nearby Jewish seminary came to her street inspecting land for possible purchase, tensions spiralled into a violent altercation.

Israa Jarbou’s husband Mahmoud, 34, and his brother Ahmad, 36, assaulted the two.

The melee was caught on tape, leading to the Jarbou brothers’ arrest.

“They want to throw us out of our home,” said Etaf Jarbou, who claims the two Jewish men came to her house. “And then they say there’s violence. But they’re committing violence against us.”

Moshe Schendowich, head of the Meirim Beyafo seminary, said he and the seminary’s rabbi were inspecting property for building student housing when the two men slapped, beat and kicked them.

“There’s no legitimacy for any type of violence, and this violence was extreme,” Schendowich said.

He said his partially state-funded organisation aims to “strengthen” Jaffa’s Jewish community.

He and the rabbi, Eliyahu Mali, are affiliated with Israel’s West Bank settlement movement.

Jaffa, Schendowich said, “is not by definition an Arab city”.

“There’s definitely an Arab population here and the Arab population here is welcome, but the Jewish community here is a thriving Jewish community.”

‘We’ve had it’ 

Arabs’ grievances in Jaffa, as elsewhere, stem from Israel’s founding in 1948, said local filmmaker Tony Copti.

“For Arab Palestinians it was the capital of education, of theatre, of cinema, schools and newspapers,” he said. “It was a country unto itself.”

Of the more than 70,000 Arab residents then, all but 3,000 fled or were expelled, according to Zochrot, an Israeli group that documents Palestinian communities erased at Israel’s founding.

In Jaffa, the state seized Arabs’ homes, subdivided them and assigned apartments to impoverished Jewish and Arab residents, who paid a symbolic low rent as “protected tenants”.

But change came in the 1980s, when Amidar began selling its properties across Israel, offering protected tenants a chance to buy their homes at a discount.

About 800 Amidar apartments in Jaffa are saleable, Amidar spokeswoman Shani Israeli told AFP.

“The goal is to sell to the resident and, if the resident doesn’t want to, then onward,” she said.

Amir Badran, a Jaffa native and a member of Tel Aviv’s city council, said most Amidar tenants in Jaffa today are Arab, and more than a third face an eviction threat.

Amidar “ignores the fact that these properties are originally Palestinian... and ignores the fact that Arabs cannot afford to buy these properties”, he said.

Olive branches 

Etaf Jarbou said she gets along with most of her Jewish neighbours.

Arabs in Jaffa typically speak Arabic peppered with Hebrew, and often study and work in Jewish Israeli society.

Many are at pains to restore harmony. Hundreds of Jaffa residents, Arab and Jewish, on Sunday protested Israeli policy and called for peaceful coexistence.

Some held olive branches, even as others aired grievances.

“Arabs of Israel, for the last three Gaza wars we didn’t do anything,” said Muhammad Mansour, 34, an Arab Israeli engineer at the demonstration.

“But now with the discrimination, we’ve had it up to here. It’s not only about Al Aqsa.”

The local battle over housing has cemented solidarity with Palestinians across the blockaded Gaza Strip, occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Etaf Jarbou highlighted a dispute in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, where Israeli settlers are attempting to expel Palestinians from homes on land that Jews owned before 1948.

“East Jerusalem breaks my heart,” she said. “And it’s not just there. It’s here. They don’t want Arabs here.”

BAGHDAD — Bashar Abo Khalil’s PUBG character dashes around a wall in a pink dress and samurai helmet, thwacking an enemy with a frying pan — standard fare in the mobile game that is a mega-sensation in Iraq.

The online star, known as G2G, is one of many Iraqis hooked on PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds — a battle royale first-person shooter game that’s reminiscent of the book and film series “The Hunger Games”.

The mobile version of the game has become so popular in Iraq, where 60 per cent of the 40-million-strong population is under 25, that the country’s youth have been dubbed the “PUBG generation”.

Iraqis across the country are spending hours every day on the game’s virtual battleground, socialising via its live chat, playing competitively or even falling in love.

Abo Khalil, 31, said he used to play for hours to “stop thinking about problems”.

“When you’re playing the game you can become closed off to the rest of the world. It can be like a drug,” he added.

Now based in Turkey, he earns a living streaming games and making videos.

Fan Dalya Waheed said she plays PUBG for an hour or two a day with friends she met on the game, and has even set up a gaming hub at the electronics reseller where she works.

“It’s really easy to meet people on PUBG,” said the woman in her thirties, who lives in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.

Better Internet, better opportunities 

Some Iraqi parents have criticised the game as time-sucking or have expressed worry about the violence it portrays, with guns-a-plenty and explosives sending up blood spatter.

But Reshar Ibrahim, who plays PUBG Mobile competitively, said the game would never be as bad as what many Iraqis had experienced in real life over the decades of conflicts that have devastated the country.

“It’s just a game,” said the 19-year-old Iraqi Kurd, who has lived in Sweden for the past three years.

In 2019, the country’s parliament banned PUBG amid local reports it was leading to bankruptcy, suicide and divorce.

The move, which was easily circumvented, was criticised as being out of touch with the real challenges facing Iraqis.

Nearly 40 per cent of Iraqi youth are unemployed, according to the World Bank, and the country’s poverty rate has doubled to 40 per cent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Later that year, thousands of young Iraqis — some dressed in PUBG outfits — filled the streets to protest endemic corruption and unemployment. Over the months that followed, some 600 demonstrators were killed in protest-related violence.

Abo Khalil and Ibrahim are just two of many successful Iraqi gamers outside the country, away from the additional challenges of poor internet and unreliable electricity that players back home face.

Ibrahim, aka Freak, recently won Most Valuable Player in the PUBG Mobile Star Arabia Challenge, which doled out $100,000 in total prize money.

His team, GunZ Esports, won the competition despite one player in Iraq losing power mid-game and another having to travel from southern Najaf to the northern Kurdistan region — where internet connectivity “is slightly better”, Ibrahim said.

Helmat Shiar, 23, who competed in the tournament with the Iraqi iKurd E-Sports team, said it wasn’t just that Iraqis “play against teams abroad who have much stronger Internet”.

There was also “no support” from private or governmental sponsors, he lamented.

Elsewhere in the Arab world, governments and major sponsors are pouring money into eSports.

In the Gulf, the gaming market is expected to reach $821 million this year, according to consulting firm Strategy&.

Hayder Jaafar said he had struggled for 10 years to register his non-governmental Iraqi Electronic Sports Federation as a full member of the international gaming body before succeeding in 2020.

“The youth ministry structure for eSports was last modified in 2009, and a lot has changed in eSports since then,” the 38-year-old told AFP.

Iraq suffers from war-ravaged infrastructure and poor electricity — most households only have a few hours of state-provided electricity per day.

But there are 40 million mobile phone connections in the country and 30 million Internet users, according to a 2021 DataReportal study.

Last year, PUBG was the 11th-most-searched term in Iraq on Google, and variations on the game’s name took several top spots on YouTube searches as well.

PUBG’s widespread popularity is in part due to the launch of a free-to-play mobile version by Chinese tech giant Tencent, which said in March that over one billion people had downloaded the app since 2018.

iKurd player Jiner Hekmat, 18, said he was hooked on the mobile version but wasn’t banking all his hopes on being a competitive player, saying he wanted to focus on his studies.

But, he added, “I’m also going to do everything I can to keep my level in PUBG, and keep playing as long as the game exists”.