Region

ABU DHABI — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday landed in the United Arab Emirates for a rare visit outside the former Soviet Union, as Moscow seeks to reassert itself on the global stage.

Isolated by the West over the Ukraine war, Putin is courting allies in the Middle East, where he will discuss oil, trade and the Hamas-Israel conflict.

“Vladimir Putin has arrived in the United Arab Emirates for a working visit,” the Kremlin said, before he was scheduled to travel onwards to Saudi Arabia.

Russian state television showed UAE President Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan and other officials greeting Putin on the runway.

Trade and oil will be on the agenda in the UAE, which is “Russia’s main economic partner in the Arab world”, according to a statement issued by the Kremlin ahead of the visit.

Bilateral trade turnover between the two countries reached a record level $9b in 2022, the Kremlin said.

Putin is expected to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman when he arrives in Saudi Arabia later Wednesday.

This is only the Russian leader’s third trip outside the former Soviet Union since he invaded Ukraine, after visits to Iran and China.

Putin has since March been wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court which has accused him of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children.

Putin skipped the BRICS summit in South Africa in August to avoid causing a “political show” and missed the in-person flagship G20 summit in September.

BEIRUT — A Lebanese soldier was killed by Israeli fire on a military post near the country's southern border on Tuesday, Lebanon's army said, the first such death since cross-border hostilities began in October.

The Lebanon-Israel border has seen intensifying exchanges of fire since war broke out between Hamas and Israel in October, mainly involving the Iran-backed Hizbollah, raising fears of a broader conflagration.

"An army military position in the... Adaysseh area was bombarded by the Israeli enemy, leaving one soldier martyred and three others injured," the Lebanese army said in a statement.

The death was the first fatality in the ranks of the country's armed forces since hostilities broke out.

Lebanon's National News Agency reported on Tuesday that Israeli forces shelled and carried out air strikes on southern Lebanon, with Hizbollah also claiming several attacks on Israeli troops and positions.

More than 110 people have been killed on the Lebanese side, mostly Hizbollah fighters and more than a dozen civilians, according to an AFP tally.

On October 9, Israeli shelling slightly injured a Lebanese officer.

On the Israeli side, six soldiers and three civilians have been killed, Israeli authorities said.

The United Nations peacekeeping mission has also said its headquarters in Lebanon’s south has been hit by shelling several times since hostilities began.

Hizbollah says its attacks on Israel have been in support of Hamas after the Palestinian group’s sudden attack on southern Israel on October 7.

AS SAWIYAH, Palestinian Territories — Moussa is eight years old and really likes marbles. But for the past month, this Palestinian boy, living in the occupied West Bank, has a new game: "Pretend daddy isn't dead."

He calls his dad, imagines what he did with his day and acts like he's suddenly going to run into him.

But his father, Bilal Saleh, was killed on October 28.

The 40-year-old was shot in the chest while picking olives with his family near his home in the village of As-Sawiyah.

Saleh is one of more than 250 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank, according to a Palestinian government tally, since Hamas's sudden attack on October 7 sparked a new war with Israel.

"He was a simple man, attached to his land," says his widow, Ikhlas, showing images on her phone of Saleh in the fields, reciting the Koran with Moussa and at a wedding.

She struggles to even look at them, let alone tell the story of what happened.

The children pressed around her fill in the details.

Spat on 

Videos from the scene show four men wearing the knitted yarmulkes that are popular among Israeli settlers, shouting towards the family as they are harvesting.

One is armed with an automatic rifle.

The family flees, but Saleh has forgotten his phone and runs back to fetch it.

A few minutes later, a gunshot rings out.

The family rushes back to find Saleh bleeding from the chest.

Continued on page 5

West Bank family sees no hope of justice in settler killings

He was taken to a hospital about 10 kilometres away but declared dead soon after.

The family says Ikhlas' brother and father saw on social media that a man had been arrested for the shooting but released a few hours later.

The police and COGAT, an Israeli defence ministry body overseeing civilian activities in the Palestinian territories, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from AFP.

A few days later, without knowing why, Ikhlas was called to a police station in Ariel, a neighbouring Israeli settlement, where police asked her to explain what she saw.

"At the entrance, while a guard was checking my identity papers, a settler drove by. He saw that I was veiled and he rolled down his window to spit on me," she told AFP.

"After that, I don't see what kind of justice they could give us," she added.

Israeli human rights group Yesh Din convinced her to file a complaint anyway, though it says a study of settler violence cases between 2005 and 2021 showed 92 percent were dismissed by the Israeli authorities.

 'Even worse' 

Nearly three million Palestinians live in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

Nearly half a million Israelis also live there in settlements considered illegal by the United Nations.

"For the past 10 years, it has been getting more and more serious," said Hazem Saleh, Bilal's brother-in-law. "We are being attacked, our land is being taken from us, settlements are being built. They have the power, they can do what they want."

Israel has relaxed laws on access to weapons, promising to arm Israeli civilians in at least 1,000 localities, including settlements.

On Saturday, settlers opened fire on a 38-year-old Palestinian in the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan, according to the Palestinian Wafa news agency.

The As-Sawiyah residents' WhatsApp group is a litany of fear and violence.

Mouna Saleh, 56, Bilal's mother-in-law, fears for the children, especially Moussa and Mayce "who are so small, what can we explain to them?"

"How can you kill a man in a few seconds, in front of children? What is this world?" she said.

"We're not calling for violence or revenge. We call for peace, justice, mercy as our Prophet Mohammed did," said Hazem.

"All we can do is tell our story, even if it pains us."

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — Israel has moved ground forces into the south of Gaza in its war on Hamas, witnesses said on Monday, despite global concern over mounting civilian deaths and fears the conflict will spread elsewhere in the Middle East.

Dozens of Israeli tanks as well as armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers entered the south of the territory near the city of Khan Yunis, which is crowded with internally displaced Palestinians, witnesses told AFP.

Amin Abu Hawli, 59, said the Israeli vehicles were “2 kilometres inside” Gaza in the village of Al Qarara, while Moaz Mohammed, 34, said Israeli tanks were rolling down the strip’s main north-south highway, the Salah Al Din road.

Weeks after Israel sent ground forces and tanks into northern Gaza, the army has been air-dropping leaflets in the besieged territory’s south, especially around Khan Yunis, telling Palestinians there to flee to other areas.

Full-scale fighting resumed on Friday after the collapse of a week-long truce brokered by Qatar, the United States and Egypt, during which Israel and Hamas had exchanged scores of hostages and prisoners.

Air strikes have since intensified in Gaza’s south, said James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF.

“Despite what has been assured, attacks in the south of Gaza are every bit as vicious as what the north endured,” he posted Monday on X, formerly Twitter.

“Somehow, it’s getting worse for children and mothers.”

Israel has vowed to crush Hamas for the Islamist group’s October 7 sudden attacks.

Israel’s military said Sunday it had carried out around 10,000 air strikes in total, while Gaza fighters had resumed rocket salvos into Israel, most of which had been intercepted.

The health ministry in Gaza says more than 15,500 people have been killed in Gaza, about 70 per cent of them women and children, a death toll that has sparked global alarm and mass demonstrations.

 ‘No safe place’ 

“There is no safe place in Gaza,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said as a UN agency estimated around 1.8 million people in Gaza, roughly 75 per cent of the population, had been displaced.

Israeli forces said on Monday three more soldiers had been killed in fighting in the northern Gaza Strip, raising the number of troop deaths there to 75.

The fatalities brought the number of Israeli forces personnel killed since October 7, among them those killed in the Hamas attacks themselves and including soldiers, reservists, kibbutz guards and others, to 401.

Under the temporary truce that expired on Friday, 80 Israeli hostages were freed, in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. More than two dozen Thai and other captives were also released from Gaza.

With at least 137 hostages still held in Gaza, according to the Israeli military, Hamas has ruled out more releases until a permanent ceasefire is agreed.

More air strikes have rained down on northern Gaza where the government and the official Palestinian news agency Wafa said the entrance of the Kamal Adwan hospital was hit late Sunday.

Several people were killed in the strike, Wafa said, while Hamas accused Israel on Telegram of a “grave violation” of humanitarian law. Contacted by AFP, the Israeli military did not immediately comment.

Israel says Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian infrastructure for military purposes, an accusation the group denies.

Nine-year-old Huda, who was wounded in the head, arrived at the Deir Al Balah hospital with a Red Cross convoy bringing casualties from northern Gaza.

“She doesn’t answer me anymore,” said her bereaved father Abdelkarim Abu Warda.

‘Too many innocents killed’ 

Israel’s ally the United States has intensified calls for the protection of Gaza’s civilians, with Vice President Kamala Harris saying that “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”.

A White House official said on Sunday the United States believes Israel is “making an effort” to minimise civilian casualties in Gaza.

Israel said on Monday it was not seeking to force Palestinian civilians to permanently leave their homes, even as it acknowledged conditions in Gaza were “tough”.

Any suggestion of Palestinian dispersal is highly contentious in the Arab world as the war that led to Israel’s creation 75 years ago gave rise to the exodus or forced displacement of 760,000 Palestinians.

Israeli occupation military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said on Monday: “We are not trying to displace anyone, we are not trying to move anybody from anywhere permanently.

“We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield and we have provided a designated humanitarian zone inside the Gaza Strip,” he said, referring to a tiny coastal area of the territory named Al Mawasi.

With fears of a wider regional conflagration rising, a US destroyer shot down multiple drones over the Red Sea while assisting commercial ships on Sunday, according to the US Central Command.

Fighting also flared on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.

Israeli forces said it had launched artillery strikes in response to cross-border fire, and its fighter jets hit targets linked to Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hizbollah.

The Israel-occupied West Bank has also seen a surge in violence since October.

The Palestinian Authority’s health ministry said two Palestinians had been shot dead in an Israeli raid on the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya, adding that Israeli forces kept the two bodies.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — Israel struck Gaza targets on Sunday in its war on Hamas as international concern mounted over the spiralling civilian death toll on the third day after the end of a week-long truce.

More than 15,200 people have been killed in the besieged Palestinian territory, according to health ministry in Gaza, in more than eight weeks of fighting that resumed after the ceasefire ended early Friday.

The UN humanitarian agency OCHA said at least 160 Palestinian deaths were reported in two incidents in northern Gaza on Saturday: the bombing of a six-storey building in Jabaliya refugee camp, and of an entire block in a Gaza City neighbourhood.

Repeated bursts of heavy automatic weapons fire were heard on Sunday over an AFPTV livecam which showed dark smoke rising over northern Gaza.

Gaza's government on Saturday said 240 people had been killed since the truce expired.

"I cannot find words strong enough to express our concern over what we're witnessing," the head of the World Health Organisation(WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Sunday on X, formerly Twitter, demanding a "Ceasefire. NOW".

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, while the group has ruled out more hostage releases until a permanent ceasefire is agreed.

“We have said it from day one: The price to pay for the release of Zionist prisoners will be the release of all our prisoners, after a ceasefire,” Saleh Al Arouri, deputy head of Hamas’s politburo, said on Saturday evening.

Israeli forces, after focusing on northern Gaza in recent weeks, has struck more targets in the territory’s south and issued warnings to Palestinians trapped there to seek what it said would be safe zones.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced “rocket barrages” against multiple Israeli cities and towns including Tel Aviv, and Israel said two of its soldiers had died in combat, the first since the truce ended.

At least seven people were killed in an Israeli bombing early Sunday near Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, the Hamas government said.

 ‘Too many’ 

innocents killed 

Israel’s ally the United States, which provides it with billions of dollars in military aid annually, has intensified calls for the protection of Gaza’s civilians.

“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters at UN climate talks in Dubai.

In a new estimate, OCHA said around 1.8 million people in Gaza, roughly 75 per cent of the population, had been displaced, many to overcrowded and unsanitary shelters.

Nasser hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis overflowed with both the wounded and the dead.

Jumana Murad said her son Mohammad, 19, was killed as he tried to help women and children out of a tent inside a school.

“A piece of shrapnel hit him in the head,” she told AFP before bursting into tears.

Tedros said a WHO team visited Nasser hospital and found it with 1,000 patients, three times its capacity. Some were being treated on the floor, “screaming in pain”, he said.

Gazans are short of food, water and other essentials, and many homes have been destroyed. 

Call for hostages return 

The truce, brokered by Qatar with support from Egypt and the United States, led to the release of 80 Israeli hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.

On Saturday office of Israeli occupation’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli negotiators were being withdrawn from Qatar “following the impasse in the negotiations”.

The Israeli forces said 137 hostages were still being held in Gaza.

The occupation’s defence minister Yoav Gallant said on Saturday that more military action was needed to “create the conditions that push Hamas to pay a heavy price, and that is in the release of hostages”.

Israeli hostages released from Gaza talked publicly on Saturday for the first time, urging their government to secure the release of the remaining captives.

“The moral obligation of this government is to bring them home immediately, without hesitation,” said Yocheved Lifschitz, 85, who was freed by Hamas before the truce deal. 

French President Emmanuel Macron appealed for “stepped-up efforts to reach a lasting ceasefire” to free all hostages, allow in more aid and to assure Israel of its security.

He said Israel’s war aim of destroying Hamas needed to be defined more precisely. “What is the total destruction of Hamas, and does anyone think it’s possible? If it is, the war will last 10 years,” Macron said.

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on Saturday drew on his experience fighting Daesh in urging Israel to protect non-combatants.

“The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians,” he told a forum in California.

Among the targets hit Saturday in Khan Yunis was a Doha-funded housing development.

At almost exactly the same time Israeli negotiators pulled out of the Qatar talks, bombs pounded the modern-looking yellow apartment blocks one by one.

Most Gazans are trapped but an Egyptian border crossing, after a closure on Friday, reopened to enable 880 foreign and dual nationals to cross along with 13 injured people, the UN said.

Aid trucks with food, medical supplies and other essentials also entered, the UN said.

Violence has also escalated in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the number of Palestinians killed by either soldiers or Israeli settlers during the war exceeds the entire toll of around 235 last year in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

KHAN YUNIS, Palestinian Territories — Patients lie on cold, bloodstained floors in hospitals filled to overflowing. Some scream in pain, but others lie silently, deathly white, too weak even to cry out.

Hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip have descended into chaos since the resumption of the war between Hamas and Israel.

After eight weeks of war, interrupted only by one seven-day pause that ended on Friday, the doctors are exhausted.

Fuel reserves have almost run dry because of Israel's blockade of the territory, so doctors are forced to choose when and where across their hospitals to run generators.

According to the United Nations, not a single hospital in the territory's north can currently operate on patients.

The most seriously wounded are transferred daily to the south by convoys organised by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

But even there, the UN says, the 12 remaining hospitals are only "partially functional".

Abdelkarim Abu Warda and his nine-year-old daughter Huda have just arrived at Deir Al Balah hospital aboard one of the ICRC convoys.

On Friday, after the truce ended, an Israeli strike hit their house in the vast Jabalia refugee camp in the north.

Huda was wounded in the head. "She had a brain haemorrhage — she was placed on a ventilator," her father told AFP.

Since then, "she hasn't responded to anything", he says, lifting up the little girl's arms.

"She doesn't answer me anymore," he repeats, sobbing.

It is daybreak and the first prayers for the dead are being performed.

A few dozen men gather in front of white body bags lined up on the ground.

Between two larger bags lies the small shroud of a child, close to his or her parents even in death.

Women in tears crouch down to touch a face or kiss a loved one for one last time before the bodies are carefully loaded into the back of a pickup.

“It’s Adam going... and there is Abdullah,” says one woman, weeping.

At the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, the largest medical facility in southern Gaza, the story is the same.

World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Sunday he was unable to “find words strong enough” to express his concerns about the conditions there.

Members of a WHO team who visited found it packed with 1,000 patients, three times its capacity.

Patients were being treated on the floor “screaming in pain”, with “countless people... seeking shelter, filling every corner”, the WHO chief wrote.

The Hamas government that runs Gaza says the Israeli campaign has killed more than 15,500 people — including 280 medical staff — since it began eight weeks ago.

‘Saw the bomb fall’ 

Israel, which has vowed to eliminate Hamas, says it is now focusing on the southern city of Khan Yunis.

The army drops warning leaflets on neighbourhoods due to be targeted each day, telling residents that a “terrible attack is imminent” and ordering them to leave.

Each day, too, the warnings move closer to the hospital.

With each new explosion that shakes the city, more casualties arrive, often in private cars.

Staff race out with stretchers which are often still stained with blood from the previous patient.

Some bodies arrive unaccompanied, and so cannot even be identified.

In the corridors, families, the wounded and medical staff all jostle together.

Some tend to the patients, sliding a sweater or a T-shirt under the head of an wounded person lying on the hard floor.

Ehab Al Najjar, a man with several family members both alive and dead at the hospital, lets his anger explode.

“I came home and saw the bomb fall on our house. Women, children died. What did they do to deserve this?” he screams.

NABEUL, Tunisia — A drone buzzed back and forth above rows of verdant orange trees planted near Nabeul, eastern Tunisia.

The black unmanned aircraft, equipped with a multi-lens camera and sensors, has been enlisted by Tunisian farmers to help adapt to years of drought and erratic weather patterns caused by climate change.

“The seasons are not like they were before where we knew exactly what to do,” said farmer Yassine Gargouri, noting temperatures now can begin to climb as early as May while in August there have been unusual summer rains. 

He hired start-up RoboCare to scan the trees from the air and assess their hydration levels, soil quality and overall health — to prevent irreversible damage.

The technology “provides us with information on how much water each plant needs, no more, no less”, he said.

The use of modern technologies in agriculture is globally on the rise, including in North Africa where countries rank among the world’s 33 most water-stressed, according to the World Resources Institute.

RoboCare, employing about 10 people, is the only company in Tunisia, according to its 35-year-old founder Imen Hbiri, to use drones to help farmers combat the impacts of climate change and reduce costs, crop losses and water consumption.

“Resorting to modern technologies in the sector of agriculture has become inevitable,” Hbiri told AFP while monitoring the drone’s path on her computer screen.

‘Challenge of tomorrow’

The daughter of farmers, the entrepreneur knows well the limits of existing farming methods.

Now, in just a few clicks, she can access scans that detect signs of illness or malnourishment before they are visible to the naked eye. 

On the screen, fields appear in RGB (red, green, blue) imagery — the greener the plants, the healthier.

Farmers can then use medicine-filled sprinklers mounted to the drones to target the sickly plants with more precision and consequently less expense.

“By relying on this technology, we can save water consumption by up to 30 per cent and reduce about 20 per cent of the cost of fertilisers and medicine, while raising crop production by 30 per cent”, Hbiri explained.

Gargouri, who spends about 80 percent of his budget on fertilisers and other remedies, says this technology is the future. 

“We must adapt to these upheavals,” Gargouri added. “It’s the challenge of tomorrow”.

Tunisia is currently experiencing its eighth year of drought (four of which were consecutive) in recent years, according to its agriculture ministry.

The country’s dams, which are the primary source for drinking water and irrigating crops, are currently only filled to about 22 per cent capacity. 

And about 20 dams, mostly located in the south, have gone completely out of service.

In neighbouring countries, water scarcity is also a major issue.

Licensing hurdles 

Morocco, where agriculture accounts for 13 per cent of the gross domestic product, 14 per cent of exports and 33 per cent of jobs, also suffered its worst drought in four decades in 2022.

Only about three percent of nearly 2 million Moroccan farmers use new technologies in their fields, Loubna El Mansouri, director of the digital centre at Morocco’s agriculture ministry, told AFP. 

A study they conducted found that using drones to water crops could use “less than 20 litres of water to irrigate one hectare compared to nearly 300 litres” used with traditional methods, Mansouri added.

Similarly, Algeria’s agriculture ministry said it was using drones and satellite imagery for mapping “to optimise the use of agricultural land by evaluating its characteristics and suitability for production”, local media reported.

For the use of these technologies to become widespread, however, Hbiri says the law needs to be changed in Tunisia and awareness raised.

Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia ban the use of unmanned drones without a permit, which in the case of commercial uses can take months to be issued.

Hbiri hopes authorities will help start-ups reach more farmers as she estimates “only 10 per cent of farmers in Tunisia depend on this type of technology”.

“We want to focus our work on the use of technology and not spend time and effort on administrative issues and moving between departments and banks, which is slowing our progress,” she said.