Fighting erupts along Lebanon-Syria border after 3 Syrian soldiers killed in earlier clashes
The Lebanese and Syrian armies said they are communicating with each other to ease tensions
Lebanese troops have been deployed in large numbers in the area
Updated 9 sec ago
AP
BEIRUT: Fighting erupted along the border between Lebanon and Syria overnight into Monday, Syrian state media reported, after three Syrian soldiers were killed in earlier clashes.
The violence came a month after dayslong fighting between the Syrian military and armed Lebanese Shia groups closely allied with the ousted Bashar Assad government in Syria’s Al-Qasr area.
Lebanon has been seeking international support to boost funding for its military as it gradually deploys troops along its porous northern and eastern borders with Syria and along its southern border with Israel.
The Lebanese and Syrian armies said they are communicating with each other to ease tensions. Lebanese troops have been deployed in large numbers in the area. Families in the border areas fled toward Hermel in Syria amid the overnight clashes and shelling.
Syria’s interim government accused militants from the Lebanese Hezbollah group of crossing northeastern Lebanon into Syria on Saturday, kidnapping three soldiers and killing them on Lebanese soil.
Hezbollah in a statement denied any involvement. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said the Shia groups were involved. The circumstances of the incident remain unclear.
Syrian state media, citing an unnamed Defense Ministry official, said the Syrian army shelled “Hezbollah gatherings that killed the Syrian soldiers” along the border.
Though the clashes largely calmed before sunrise, Lebanese media reported low-level fighting at dawn after an attack on a Syrian military vehicle.
The number of casualties remains unclear.
The Lebanese military said it delivered the bodies of the three killed soldiers to their Syrian counterparts.
UNRWA chief confident he is on ‘right side of history’
UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini acknowledges that it has been “stressful” leading the embattled UN agency for Palestinian refugees, but says he is confident he is “on the right side of history“
Updated 17 March 2025
AFP
GENEVA: UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini acknowledges that it has been “stressful” leading the embattled UN agency for Palestinian refugees, but says he is confident he is “on the right side of history.”
The 61-year-old head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees has, along with his organization, withstood a barrage of criticism and accusations from Israel since Hamas’s deadly October 7, 2023 attack inside Israel and the devastating war in Gaza that followed.
“Of course it is stressful. No one could really be prepared for something like this,” Lazzarini told AFP in a recent interview.
It has been rough from the start.
The softly-spoken Swiss father of four began his tenure in 2020 under Covid lockdown, as UNRWA was reeling after the United States — traditionally its largest donor — dramatically slashed its contribution during President Donald Trump’s first term.
But that was nothing compared to what was to come.
“October 7 basically ... destroyed the last protection dikes that UNRWA might have had,” he said, lamenting the “arsenal” it unleashed “to try to discredit the agency, attack the agency, get rid of the agency.”
Relations between Israel and UNRWA, which supports nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, have long been strained, but they have fallen off a cliff in the past year and a half.
Israel’s allegation that some UNRWA staff took part in the October 7 attack spurred a string of nations early last year to at least temporarily halt their backing for the already cash-strapped agency.
Lazzarini warned of “the real risk of the agency collapsing and imploding.”
Serving as the “backbone” of the aid operation in Gaza, UNRWA should have funding until June, he said.
“I have no visibility” beyond that, added Lazzarini, speaking to AFP on the sidelines of the FIFDH human rights film festival in Geneva where a film about UNRWA was featured.
Funding gaps are not the only problem the agency faces.
Amid accusations that UNRWA was “infested with Hamas terror activity,” Israel in January took the unprecedented step of severing ties with the UN agency and banning it from operating on Israeli soil.
While UNRWA can still operate in Gaza and the West Bank, it has been barred from contact with Israeli officials, making it difficult to coordinate the safe delivery of aid in the Palestinian territories.
No aid is meanwhile going into Gaza, since Israel halted deliveries to the Strip amid a deadlock over a fragile ceasefire.
“This decision threatens the life and survival of civilians in Gaza,” Lazzarini warned.
He also described the situation in the West Bank, where Israel has for weeks been carrying out a major offensive, “deeply, deeply troubling.”
While uncertain how things would evolve, he said the threat of an Israeli annexation of the West Bank was hanging like “a Damocles sword over the head of the Palestinians (and) the international community.”
Israel has said that UNRWA can be replaced by other UN agencies or NGOs.
But Lazzarini argued that while other organizations could handle distributing humanitarian aid, they could not replace UNRWA’s delivery of “government-like services” such as education and health care.
Without UNRWA, “we would definitely sacrifice a generation of kids, who would be deprived from proper education,” he warned.
Education should also be a top priority for Israel, he insisted.
“If you deprive 100,000 girls and boys in Gaza (of an) education, and if they have no future, and if their school is just despair and living in the rubble, I would say we are just sowing the seeds for more extremism.”
Israel has for years accused UNRWA schools teaching anti-Semitism and a hatred of Israel.
Lazzarini decried “an extraordinary war of disinformation” against the agency.
Lazzarini, who himself has been the target of virulent attacks, acknowledged that “certainly I don’t read everything and don’t listen to everything.”
“Otherwise you wouldn’t sleep anymore.”
He added: “If I didn’t feel that I am still on the right side of history, I don’t think I would continue to carry on.”
But, he said, “I have been given a voice, and obviously I need to use this voice.”
“That is the minimum we owe to the Palestinian refugees who are pretty voiceless.”
US vows to keep hitting Houthis until shipping attacks stop
US defense secretary’s statement comes a day after America’s air strikes against Yemen’s Houthis on Sunday
Houthi leader Abdul Malik Al-Houthi vows to continue attacks against US ships “if they continue their aggression“
Updated 17 March 2025
Reuters
WASHINGTON/ADEN: The United States will keep attacking Yemen’s Houthis until they end attacks on shipping, the US defense secretary said on Sunday, as the Iran-aligned group signaled it could escalate in response to deadly US strikes the day before.
The airstrikes are the biggest US military operation in the Middle East since President Donald Trump took office in January. One US official told Reuters the campaign might continue for weeks.
A spokesperson for the Houthi-run health ministry said the death toll of the US attacks has risen to 53. Five children and two women were among the victims while the number of injuries rose to 98, Anees Alsbahi, the spokesperson, added on X.
Houthi leader Abdul Malik Al-Houthi said on Sunday that his militants would target US ships in the Red Sea as long as the US continues its attacks on Yemen. “If they continue their aggression, we will continue the escalation,” he said in a televised speech.
The Houthi movement’s political bureau described the attacks as a “war crime,” while Moscow urged Washington to cease the strikes.
The Houthis’ military spokesperson on Sunday said, without offering evidence, that the group had targeted US aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and its warships in the Red Sea with ballistic missiles and drones in response to the US attacks.
A US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to Reuters, dismissed the claims, saying they were not aware of any Houthi attack on the Truman.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures“: “The minute the Houthis say we’ll stop shooting at your ships, we’ll stop shooting at your drones. This campaign will end, but until then it will be unrelenting.”
“This is about stopping the shooting at assets ... in that critical waterway, to reopen freedom of navigation, which is a core national interest of the United States, and Iran has been enabling the Houthis for far too long,” he said. “They better back off.”
The Houthis, who have taken control of most of Yemen over the past decade, said last week they would resume attacks on Israeli ships passing through the Red Sea if Israel did not lift a block on aid entering Gaza.
They had launched scores of attacks on shipping after Israel’s war with Hamas began in late 2023, saying they were acting in solidarity with Gaza’s Palestinians.
Trump also told Iran, the Houthis’ main backer, to stop supporting the group immediately. He said if Iran threatened the United States, “America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!“
Iran warns US not to escalate
In response, Hossein Salami, the top commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, said the Houthis made their own decisions.
“We warn our enemies that Iran will respond decisively and destructively if they carry out their threats,” he told state media.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday called for “utmost restraint and a cessation of all military activities” in Yemen and warned new escalation could “fuel cycles of retaliation that may further destabilize Yemen and the region, and pose grave risks to the already dire humanitarian situation in the country,” his spokesperson said in a statement.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” program: “There’s no way the ... Houthis would have the ability to do this kind of thing unless they had support from Iran. And so this was a message to Iran: don’t keep supporting them, because then you will also be responsible for what they are doing in attacking Navy ships and attacking global shipping.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called Rubio to urge an “immediate cessation of the use of force and the importance for all sides to engage in political dialogue,” Moscow said.
Most of the 31 people confirmed killed in the US strikes were women and children, said Anees Al-Asbahi, spokesperson for the Houthi-run health ministry. More than 100 were injured.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the claims of civilian casualties. Reuters could not independently verify the claims.
Residents in Sanaa said the strikes hit a neighborhood known to host several members of the Houthi leadership.
“The explosions were violent and shook the neighborhood like an earthquake. They terrified our women and children,” said one of the residents, who gave his name as Abdullah Yahia.
In Sanaa, a crane and bulldozer were used to remove debris at one site and people used their bare hands to pick through the rubble. At a hospital, medics treated the injured, including children, and the bodies of several casualties were placed in a yard, wrapped in plastic sheets, Reuters footage showed.
Strikes also targeted Houthi military sites in the city of Taiz, two witnesses said on Sunday.
Houthis’ Red Sea attacks disrupt global trade route
Another strike, on a power station in the town of Dahyan, led to a power cut, Al-Masirah TV reported early on Sunday. Dahyan is where Abdul Malik Al-Houthi, the enigmatic leader of the Houthis, often meets visitors.
The Houthi attacks on shipping have disrupted global commerce and set the US military off on a costly campaign to intercept missiles and drones.
The group suspended its campaign when Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza in January.
But on March 12, the Houthis said their threat to attack Israeli ships would remain in effect until Israel reapproved the delivery of aid and food into Gaza.
NGOs fear new rules will make helping Palestinians ‘almost impossible’
Since the war in Gaza broke out, aid organizations have been contending with a ‘slippery slope’ when it comes to Israeli authorities’ tolerance for their work
COGAT, the Israeli body responsible for overseeing Palestinian affairs, presented a plan last month for reorganizing aid distribution
Updated 17 March 2025
AFP
JERUSALEM: Aid workers in the Palestinian territories told AFP they are concerned that rules recently floated by Israel could make already difficult humanitarian work “almost impossible.”
Since the war in Gaza broke out with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, aid organizations have been contending with a “slippery slope” when it comes to Israeli authorities’ tolerance for their work, said one senior NGO staffer.
But after COGAT, the Israeli body responsible for overseeing Palestinian affairs, presented a plan last month for reorganizing aid distribution, that slope has gotten “much steeper,” with some NGOs deeming the proposed changes unacceptable, she added.
COGAT did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
The staffer and others interviewed requested anonymity for fear of repercussions for their operations in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip, where responding to the acute humanitarian crisis brought on by the war had already been a Herculean undertaking.
“The ability to deliver aid and adhere to humanitarian principles in Gaza, the access restrictions we’re facing in the West Bank... All of these things, when you put them together, you just feel like you’re watching the apocalypse,” she said.
“We basically have a fire extinguisher trying to put out a nuclear bomb.”
According to NGOs, COGAT presented a plan at the end of February that aims to reinforce Israeli oversight of aid by establishing logistics centers linked to the army and by enforcing tighter control over the entire humanitarian supply chain.
“Logistically, it will be almost impossible,” said one member of a medical NGO, wondering whether such organizations would be forced to declare individual recipients of various medications.
COGAT’s stated objective, according to the NGOs, is to combat looting and the misappropriation of aid by militants.
But the NGOs say they believe looting is currently marginal, and that the best way of avoiding it is to step up deliveries.
Israel, meanwhile, cut off aid deliveries to Gaza entirely early this month over an impasse with Hamas on how to proceed with a fragile ceasefire.
“The thinking (of COGAT) was that Hamas would rebuild itself thanks to humanitarian aid,” said a representative of a European NGO, “but that’s false, and humanitarian aid won’t bring them rockets or missiles.”
Israel “just wants more control over this territory,” he added.
The NGOs said COGAT did not specify when the new rules would take effect.
A separate government directive that came into force in March established a new, stricter framework for registering NGOs working with Palestinians.
It requires organizations to share extensive information on their staff, and gives the government the right to reject employees it deems to be linked to the “delegitimization” of Israel.
NGOs operating in the Palestinian territories already face numerous difficulties, and even outright danger, particularly in Gaza.
At least 387 employees have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to a recent UN estimate.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, which was recently banned from operating in Israel, said the humanitarian community is wondering “how far can we go while remaining principled,” and at what point that would no longer be the case under the new rules.
Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGO network PNGO, said organizations “need to all work against” the new restrictions, adding that he believed the rules’ actual goal was to “prevent accountability and any kind of criticism on Israel toward what they committed” in Gaza and the West Bank.
“Lives are at stake,” he added.
The head of an international NGO agreed that a “red line has been crossed and I think we should oppose it.”
But one humanitarian in the medical sector said a principled stand would only draw flak from the Israelis, and “given the needs (of the Palestinians), principled positions don’t hold water.”
Doctor at Brown University deported to Lebanon despite US judge’s order
Alawieh, a Lebanese citizen, has an H-1B visa authorizing her to work at Brown University, yet she was detained on Thursday after returning from travel to Lebanon
Her expulsion is set to be the focus of a hearing on Monday before a federal judge in Boston, who demanded information on whether his order had been “willfully” disobeyed
Updated 17 March 2025
Reuters
BOSTON: A Rhode Island doctor who is an assistant professor at Brown University’s medical school has been deported to Lebanon even though a judge had issued an order blocking the US visa holder’s immediate removal from the country, according to court papers.
The expulsion of Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, is set to be the focus of a hearing on Monday before a federal judge in Boston, who on Sunday demanded information on whether US Customs and Border Protection had “willfully” disobeyed his order.
US District Judge Leo Sorokin, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said he had received a “detailed and specific” timeline of the events from an attorney working on Alawieh’s behalf that raised “serious allegations” about whether his order was violated.
HIGHLIGHTS
• Rasha Alawieh was removed after arriving at Boston airport
• Judge questions if Customs and Border Protection disobeyed his order
• Court hearing set for Monday
The agency has not said why she was removed. But her expulsion came as Republican US President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to sharply restrict border crossing and ramp up immigration arrests.
A CBP spokesperson, Hilton Beckham, in a statement said migrants bear the burden of establishing admissibility and that the agency’s officers “adhere to strict protocols to identify and stop threats.”
Alawieh, a Lebanese citizen who lives in Providence, was detained on Thursday after arriving at Logan International Airport in Boston after traveling to Lebanon to see relatives, according to a lawsuit filed by her cousin, Yara Chehab.
She had held a visa to be in the United States since 2018, when she first came to complete a two-year fellowship at Ohio State University before then completing a fellowship at the University of Washington and then moving to the Yale-Waterbury Internal Medicine Program, which she completed in June.
While in Lebanon, the US consulate issued Alawieh an H-1B visa authorizing her entry into the United States to work at Brown University, the lawsuit said. Such visas are reserved for people from other countries who are employed in specialty occupations.
Despite that visa, CBP detained her at the airport for reasons her family members have still not been provided, according to the lawsuit, which argued her rights were being violated.
In response to the lawsuit, Sorokin on Friday evening issued orders barring Alawieh’s removal from Massachusetts without 48 hours’ notice to the court and requiring her to be brought to a court hearing on Monday.
Yet according to the cousin’s attorneys, after that order was issued, Alawieh was flown to Paris, where she was then set to board a flight for Lebanon that had been scheduled for Sunday.
Sorokin on Sunday directed the government to provide a legal and factual response by Monday morning ahead of the previously scheduled hearing and to preserve all emails, text messages and other documents concerning Alawieh’s arrival and removal.
Concerns have also been raised in other cases about whether the Trump administration is complying with court rulings blocking parts of its agenda.
The Trump administration on Sunday said it has deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador under seldom-used wartime powers, despite a federal judge’s order temporarily barring such deportations.
Sudanese police accuse RSF paramilitaries after 11 bodies found at bottom of a well in Khartoum
The bodies of 11 people were recovered Saturday from the deep well in the Fayhaa neighborhood of the city
Police say the victims were killed by paramilitary by the paramilitary RSF when itwas controlling the area
Updated 17 March 2025
AP
CAIRO: Sudanese authorities said Sunday many bodies have been found at the bottom of a well in the capital, Khartoum, a few days after the military cleared the area from a notorious paramilitary group.
The bodies of 11 people, including women and children, were recovered Saturday from the deep well in the Fayhaa neighborhood of the city, according to police.
Col. Abdul-Rahanan Mohamed Hassan, head of the civil defense’s field team in Khartoum, said a search of the the area was mounted after residents reported that they found a dead body in the well.
“We found inside this well different characters (bodies), males and females, adults and children,” Hassan said, adding that authorities were still searching the well.
Police say the victims were killed by the Rapid Support Forces before being thrown into the well when the paramilitary force was controlling the area. The military retook the area earlier this month as part of its sweeping advances in Khartoum and its sister city of Omdurman.
There was no immediate comment from the RSF.
Afraa Al-Hajj Omar, a resident of the nearby Hajj Youssef neighborhood, said that the RSF killed many people in the area and their bodies were left for days in the streets. She said many bodies were thrown in the well. “They robbed us, beat us, and tortured us,” she said.
Sudan was plunged into chaos in April 2023 when simmering tensions between the military and the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces exploded into open warfare across the country.
At least 20,000 people have been killed, though the number is likely far higher. The war has driven more than 14 million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.
The fighting, which wrecked Khartoum and other urban areas has been marked by atrocities including mass rape and ethnically motivated killings that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially in the western region of Darfur, according to the United Nations and international rights groups.
The war has intensified in recent months, with the military making steady advances against the RSF in Khartoum and elsewhere in the country.
