Region

MOGADISHU — Fighters from the group Al Shabaab stormed a military base outside Somalia's capital Mogadishu on Saturday, with casualties reported, military officers and witnesses said.

The early-morning raid occurred in Busley, 40 kilometres  from Mogadishu, where Somali security forces have set up temporary bases for operations against Al Shabaab dominated villages in the region, according to security sources.

The assault comes after Al Shabaab gunmen attacked a hotel near the presidential palace in Mogadishu on March 14, killing three people and demonstrating the group's continued ability to strike despite a major military offensive against the terrorists.

Mohamed Adan, a military officer in the nearby district of Afgoye, said heavy fighting had erupted after "terrorists" attacked the Busley base.

"They blew up a vehicle loaded with explosives in the early morning before the gunmen engaged in a face-to-face armed confrontation with security forces," Adan told AFP.

"The Somali army defended their position and several soldiers including a commander were confirmed dead," he added.

"The desperate terrorists also ambushed a reinforcement military convoy along the road near Dhanaane but they lost a dozen fighters" in the incident, Adan said, adding that Somali forces were now back in control of the area.

The Al Qaeda affiliated group claimed in a statement its fighters had overrun the Busley base and that among those killed was the base commander.

The claims could not be independently verified and the Somali government has made no official comment on the attack.

'Heavy explosions' 

"We heard heavy explosions and gunfire this morning," said Hassan Nur, a resident of Jazeera village near Busley, adding that he saw a military convoy pass on the road heading towards the area of the fighting.

Al Shabaab has been waging a deadly insurgency against the fragile central government in Mogadishu for more than 16 years.

Although the militants were driven out of the capital by an African Union force in 2011, they still have a strong presence in rural Somalia and have carried out numerous attacks against political, security and civilian targets mostly in Somalia but also in neighbouring countries including Kenya.

Somalia’s beleaguered federal government launched a major offensive against the Islamists in August 2022, joining forces with local clan militias.

The army and militias known as “macawisley” have retaken swathes of territory in central Somalia in an operation backed by an AU mission known as ATMIS and US air strikes.

But the offensive has suffered setbacks, with Al Shabaab earlier this month claiming it had taken multiple locations in the centre of the country.

JENIN, Palestinian Territories — An Israeli strike on Wednesday killed three Palestinians in a car in the occupied West Bank, including a senior Islamic Jihad fighters, the Palestinian health ministry said.

AFP journalists saw a crowd gathered around the charred remains of a vehicle and blood on the pavement in the northern West Bank city of Jenin after the army said "an aircraft struck two senior Islamic Jihad operatives".

The military said it had "eliminated" Ahmed Barakat, whom it accused of a May 2023 attack that killed an Israeli settler.

Three other militants were also "struck" in the attack, according to a military statement.

According to the Palestinian ministry, the strike killed three people including Barakat and wounded one.

Islamic Jihad's armed wing confirmed in a statement that Barakat, whom it said headed its military operations in Jenin, had been killed.

Witness Amir Al Sabah, 30, said: "Suddenly there was an explosion near my car. Because of the force of the blast, my car caught fire, so I had to get out."

Emergency workers sprayed blood off the street with a hose after the strike, while a drone could be heard buzzing overhead.

Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp are a stronghold of armed Palestinian groups opposing Israel, which has occupied the West Bank since 1967.

Israeli troops regularly carry out incursions into Palestinian communities but until several months ago had rarely struck the West Bank from the air.

Violence in the territory has intensified since war broke out between Hamas and Israel, sparked by the Gaza militants' October attack on southern Israel.

According to the Ramallah-based health ministry, Israeli troops and settlers have killed at least 435 Palestinians in the West Bank since the Gaza war began.

The Hamas sudden attack on October 7 resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel.

Israel's military has since waged a relentless offensive against Hamas that has killed at least 31,900 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas-ruled territory's health ministry.

UNITED NATIONS, United States — After nearly a year of war, Sudan is suffering one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history, the United Nations warned on Wednesday, slamming the international community for lack of action.

Fighting between army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, has since April killed tens of thousands and led to acute food shortages and a looming famine.

"By all measures — the sheer scale of humanitarian needs, the numbers of people displaced and facing hunger — Sudan is one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory," Edem Wosornu, director of operations at the UN Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), said.

"A humanitarian travesty is playing out in Sudan under a veil of international inattention and inaction," Wosornu told the Security Council Wednesday on behalf of UNOCHA head Martin Griffiths.

"Simply put, we are failing the people of Sudan," she added, describing the population's "desperation".

According to the UN, the conflict has seen more than 8 million people displaced.

The Security Council earlier this month called for an immediate ceasefire during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and urged better access to humanitarian aid.

But "I regret to report that there has not been major progress on the ground," Wosornu told the Council Wednesday.

In total, more than 18 million Sudanese are facing acute food insecurity — a record during harvest season, and 10 million more than at this time last year — while 730,000 Sudanese children are thought to suffer from severe malnutrition.

Griffiths warned the Security Council last week in a letter seen by AFP that "almost five million people could slip into catastrophic food insecurity in some parts of the country in the coming months".

UN World Food Programme's Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau said Wednesday, "If we are going to prevent Sudan from becoming the world's largest hunger crisis, coordinated efforts and joined up diplomacy is urgent and critical."

He cautioned there is a “high risk” the country could see famine levels of hunger when the agricultural lean season begins in May.

Malnutrition is “already claiming children’s lives”, Wosornu said, adding that humanitarian experts estimate some 222,000 children could die of the condition in the coming weeks and months.

Additionally, she said, children weakened from hunger are at a higher risk of dying from other preventable causes, as more than 70 per cent of the country’s health infrastructure has collapsed.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — Efforts to hammer out a temporary truce in Gaza intensified on Tuesday after months of war that have left parts of the devastated territory facing imminent famine.

A UN-backed assessment described the increasingly dire situation by noting that without a surge of aid famine would hit the 300,000 people in Gaza's war-battered north by May.

Gaza's 2.4 million people are trapped in the fighting, which again flared at the territory's biggest hospital Al Shifa as an Israeli raid stretched into Tuesday.

But positive signals have been reported from negotiations for a new truce that would include an exchange of hostages for prisoners and increased aid deliveries.

US media outlet Axios said the opening session of talks in Doha was “positive”, citing what it called a source with direct knowledge of the negotiations.

“Both parties came with some compromises and willingness to negotiate,” the source said, according to the report.

There have been no public announcements from Monday’s scheduled talks between Israel’s spy chief David Barnea and Egyptian and Qatari mediators.

The new truce push follows the latest proposal from Hamas for a six-week ceasefire, vastly more aid into Gaza and the initial release of about 42 hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

During the proposed truce, Israeli forces would withdraw from “all cities and populated areas” in Gaza, according to a Hamas official.

The talks in the Qatari capital are the first since weeks of intense negotiations involving Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators failed to secure a truce between Israel and Hamas for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began last week.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week to discuss the truce push and ways to step up deliveries of desperately needed relief supplies.

“According to the most respected measure of these things, 100 per cent of the population in Gaza is at severe levels of acute food insecurity, Blinken said on visit to the Philippines on Tuesday.

“That’s the first time an entire population has been so classified.”

Biden demands Rafah talks 

International pressure has grown for Israel to do more to protect civilian lives.

US President Joe Biden, a key backer of Israel, told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to send a team to Washington to discuss how to avoid an all-out assault in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Netanyahu has insisted on sending troops into Rafah to root out Hamas in the area that borders Egypt and Israel.

But the roughly 1.5 million Gazans crammed into the territory’s southernmost tip have the Mediterranean Sea to their west and sealed borders to the south and east, while Israeli forces are poised to push in from the north.

During its raid on Al Shifa more than 20 militants were killed inside the hospital complex, the army said, and another 20 were killed in the surrounding area. Troops also arrested more than 200 suspects, it added.

Witnesses reported air strikes and tanks near the complex crowded with thousands of displaced people, as well as the sick and wounded.

The Israeli forces identified one of the dead as Hamas internal security official Fayq Al Mabhouh. A Gaza police source confirmed his death and said he was a brigadier general in the force.

Israeli troops previously raided Al Shifa in November, sparking an international outcry.

In Washington, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan reported the death of senior Hamas official Marwan Issa.

Israel had on March 11 said an air strike on an underground compound in central Gaza targeted Issa, whom it called the deputy head of Hamas’s armed wing. At the time it was unclear if he had been killed.

In January, Israel said it had “completed the dismantling” of Hamas’ command structure in northern Gaza, but on Monday military spokesman Daniel Hagari said Palestinian militants and commanders have since returned to Al Shifa “and turned it into a command centre”.

Israel has repeatedly said the complex housed an underground Hamas control base, which the figters have denied.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories, — Fighting raged Monday in and around the besieged Gaza Strip's largest hospital complex where Israel said its forces killed and arrested Hamas fighters, as Palestinians fled by foot under heavy bombardment.

While the army launched the overnight raid at Gaza City's Al Shifa hospital, the Israeli government sent the head of its Mossad spy agency to Qatar for renewed talks toward a ceasefire and hostage release deal.

The devastating war since Hamas's October 7 surprise attack on Israel has left roughly half of Gazans — around 1.1 million people — experiencing "catastrophic" hunger, a UN-backed food security assessment warned.

The expert report is "exhibit A for the need for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire", said United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, decrying an "entirely man-made disaster".

"We must act now to prevent the unthinkable, the unacceptable and the unjustifiable," he said.

Gaza's soaring civilian death toll and large-scale destruction have hardened global opposition to Israel's military operation and siege, including accusations of deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Israel’s military campaign had turned long-blockaded Gaza from the world’s “greatest open-air prison” into its biggest “open-air graveyard”, and that Israel was using famine as a “weapon of war”.

Foreign Minister Israel Katz replied that “Israel allows extensive humanitarian aid into Gaza” and accused Borrell of “attacking Israel”.

In the latest heavy battle, Israeli forces raided Al Shifa in an operation the army said targeted senior Hamas fighters.

Witnesses reported air strikes and tanks near the complex crowded with thousands of Palestinian patients and displaced people.

AFP images showed black smoke engulfing parts of the city after bombardment, with Palestinians fleeing by foot along rubble-strewn roads as others treated the wounded in the street.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said nearby residents had reported dozens of casualties who could not be helped “due to the intensity of gunfire and artillery shelling”.

An AFP journalist witnessed air strikes on buildings in the area around Al Shifa and reported seeing “hundreds of people, mostly children, women, and the elderly, fleeing their homes”.

Hospital raided again

The Israeli military, which had asked Gazans to evacuate the area, said 20 militants were killed and dozens of others were detained at the hospital.

The army identified one of the fatalities as Hamas internal security official Fayq Al Mabhouh, saying that “weapons were located in the room adjacent to where he was eliminated”.

A Gaza police source confirmed his death and said he was a brigadier general in the force. Relatives said he was also the brother of Mahmoud Al Mabhouh, one of the founders of Hamas’ armed wing slain in Dubai in 2010.

Israeli forces previously raided Al Shifa in November, when ground operations were focused on northern Gaza. In January Israel said it had “completed the dismantling” of Hamas’ command structure in the area.

Israel has repeatedly said the complex housed an underground Hamas control base, which the militants have denied.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “terribly worried” about the renewed fighting around Al Shifa which was “endangering health workers, patients and civilians”.

Israel has carried out a relentless bombing campaign and ground offensive that Gaza’s health ministry says has killed at least 31,726 people, most of them women and children.

‘Nothing to eat’

As the fighting flared around Al Shifa, elsewhere in Gaza City a massive crowd gathered at a UN food distribution centre to collect bags of flour.

“There’s nothing to eat or drink. Children are dying,” said resident Umm Omar Al Masharwai.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which operates the facility and coordinates nearly all aid to Gaza, has faced funding cuts since Israel accused about a dozen of its employees of involvement in the October 7 attack.

UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said on Monday he intended to visit Gaza but had been denied entry by “Israeli authorities”, a claim Israel did not immediately comment on.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi accused Israel of “starving children to death” in its siege of the Gaza Strip, and humanitarian charity Oxfam said Israel was “systematically and deliberately” blocking aid.

Global concern has focussed on Gaza’s far-southern city of Rafah, where about 1.5 million Palestinians now live, many of them in crowded shelters and tent cities near the Egyptian border.

Repeated Israeli warnings of a looming ground invasion have raised fears of an even worse humanitarian catastrophe.

Truce talks

Responding to concerns voiced by top ally the United States and other governments, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday reiterated that civilians would be evacuated from Rafah before any ground attack, without detailing where to.

Mediation efforts toward a truce were expected to resume, following a week-long ceasefire in November.

A meeting in Qatar between Israel’s Mossad spy chief, David Barnea, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and Egyptian officials “is expected to take place today”, a source close to the talks said.

It follows the latest proposal submitted by Hamas for a six-week truce, vastly more aid into Gaza and the initial release of about 42 hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

During the proposed truce, Israeli forces would withdraw from “all cities and populated areas” in Gaza, according to a Hamas official.

Netanyahu’s office said on Friday that Hamas’s new proposal was “unrealistic” but that Israel would send a delegation to Doha.

The White House said US President Joe Biden and Netanyahu spoke on Monday in their first call for over a month, with tensions rising over the war and its impact on civilians.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Sunday to send ground forces into Gaza's southern Rafah city despite growing international concern over the fate of Palestinian civilians sheltering there.

Netanyahu, whose security and war Cabinets were later due to discuss latest international efforts towards a truce deal, stressed that "no amount of international pressure will stop us from realising all the goals of the war".

"To do this, we will also operate in Rafah," he told a Cabinet meeting, hours before he was set to meet visiting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for talks on the war raging since October 7.

Israel has repeatedly threatened to launch a ground offensive against Hamas fighters in Rafah, now home to nearly 1.5 million mostly displaced Gazans sheltering near the Egyptian border.

US President Joe Biden, whose country provides Israel with billions of dollars in military assistance, has said a Rafah invasion would be a "red line" without credible measures to protect civilians.

UN World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged Israel "in the name of humanity" not to launch a Rafah assault, warning that "this humanitarian catastrophe must not be allowed to worsen".

Envoys were planning to meet in Qatar soon to revive stalled talks for a ceasefire and hostage release deal.

A Hamas proposal calls for an Israeli withdrawal from "all cities and populated areas" in Gaza during a six-week truce and for more humanitarian aid, according to an official from the Palestinian group.

Israel plans to attend the talks, with Cabinet members due to "decide on the mandate of the delegation in charge of the negotiations before its departure for Doha", Netanyahu's office said, without giving a date for when they would leave.

The war, meanwhile, raged on, and overnight Israeli bombardment across the Hamas-ruled territory killed at least 61 Palestinians, the Gaza health ministry said.

The dead included 12 members of the same family whose house was hit in Deir Al Balah, in central Gaza.

Palestinian girl Leen Thabit, retrieving a white dress from under the rubble of their flattened house, cried as she told AFP her cousin was killed in the strike.

“She’s dead. Only her dress is left,” Thabit said. “What do they want from us?”

Second aid ship 

The war was triggered by Hamas’s October 7 sudden attack on southern Israel that resulted in about 1,160 deaths.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign against Hamas has killed at least 31,645 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry.

Shelling and clashes were reported in south Gaza’s main city of Khan Yunis and elsewhere, and the Israeli army said its forces had killed “approximately 18 terrorists” in central Gaza since Saturday.

More than five months of war and an Israeli siege have led to dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza, where the UN has repeatedly warned of looming famine for the coastal territory’s 2.4 million people.

As the flow of aid trucks into Gaza has slowed, a second ship was due to depart from Cyprus along a new maritime corridor to bring food and relief goods, said officials of the island-nation.

On Saturday the US charity World Central Kitchen said its team had finished unloading supplies from a barge towed by Spanish aid vessel Open Arms which had pioneered the sea route.

Jordan on Sunday announced the latest aid airdrop over northern Gaza together with German, US and Egyptian aircraft.

The United Nations has reported particular difficulty in accessing the north, where residents say they have resorted to eating animal fodder, and where some have stormed the few aid trucks that have made it through.

Malnutrition and disease 

Netanyahu has faced domestic pressure over the remaining captives, with protesters rallying in Tel Aviv on Saturday carrying banners urging a “hostage deal now”.

“The civilians... need to demand from their leaders to do the right thing,” said one demonstrator, Omer Keidar, 27.

In Rafah, the crisis has only grown worse, said medical staff at a clinic run by Palestinian volunteers that offers treatment for displaced Gazans.

“We’re facing shortages of medications,” said Dr Samar Gregea, herself displaced from Gaza City in the north.

“There are a lot of patients in the camp, with all children suffering from malnutrition” and a spike in hepatitis A cases, she told AFP.

“Children require foods high in sugars, like dates, which are currently unavailable.”