Hamas says ‘lost contact’ with group holding Israeli-American hostage after strike

GENEVA: The United Nations said Tuesday that it expected more than two million people displaced in war-ravaged Sudan to return to Khartoum within the next six months, if security conditions allow.
Fighting erupted in Sudan on April 15, 2023 between the army, led by Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, headed by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
As the world marks the two-year anniversary of the devastating conflict, which has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted around 13 million, the UN’s International Organization for Migration noted the need to prepare for many of the displaced to begin returning home to Khartoum.
The capital city became a battleground almost from the start, but since the army recaptured it last month, the agency said “we are seeing people returning, we are seeing hope coming.”
“Our estimate in IOM is that over the next six months, we will have 2.1 million returning to the Khartoum capital,” Mohamed Refaat, its chief of mission in Sudan, told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Port Sudan.
This calculation, he said, was “based on the numbers we understand that... left the capital when the war started.”
“So we estimate that 31 percent of... IDPs (internally displaced people) in Sudan after the war are actually coming from Khartoum,” he said, adding that the agency expected around half of them to “be returning back to Khartoum.”
The returns, he said, would depend on “the security situation and... the availability of services on the ground.”
Getting the city ready for a mass influx will be a challenge, Refaat acknowledged.
“We see that some spots in the Khartoum itself have been cleaned, but the process I’m sure will take longer,” he said, adding that “the electricity system in the whole Khartoum has been destroyed.”
Refaat also warned that “as we see people are returning, the war is far from stopped,” with thousands still being displaced elsewhere in the country, especially in the Darfur region.
“The conflict has to stop, and we need to put all effort for this conflict to stop,” he said.
But Refaat acknowledged that the funds raised to address Sudan’s towering needs were far from sufficient.
The IOM unveiled a response plan Tuesday asking for nearly $29 million to reach around half a million people in Khartoum, including returnees, he said.

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party accused the head of the domestic intelligence organization on Tuesday of turning parts of the service into “a private militia of the Deep State” and called for him to go, amid a deepening political crisis around the agency.
The accusation against Shin Bet head Ronen Bar, who is resisting an order for his dismissal, followed the arrest of a Shin Bet official on suspicion of leaking confidential information to journalists and a government minister.
Shin Bet, which handles counter terrorism investigations, has been at the center of a growing political battle pitting Netanyahu’s right-wing government against an array of critics ranging from members of the security establishment to families of hostages in Gaza.
A government bid to sack Bar, during an investigation by the agency into aides close to Netanyahu, has been temporarily frozen by the Supreme Court, which held a hearing into petitions against the dismissal last week.
Likud said Bar had lost the trust of the government and “must stop entrenching himself in his position and vacate his position immediately.”
The case, which has fueled demonstrations by thousands of protesters who accuse Netanyahu of undermining Israeli democracy, has exposed deep rifts between the government and one of the country’s key security organizations.
Part of the dispute centers around blame over the failures that allowed Hamas gunmen to rampage through communities in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage in Israel’s worst-ever security disaster.
Netanyahu said last month he had lost confidence in Bar over Shin Bet’s failure to forestall the October 7 attack. But critics have accused the prime minister of using the case as a pretext to stop a police and Shin Bet investigation into alleged financial ties between Qatar and a number of Netanyahu aides.
Bar has acknowledged his agency’s failures ahead of October 7 and said he would resign before the end of his term. But he has accused Netanyahu, who has not acknowledged any responsibility and rejected calls for a national inquiry into October 7, of a major conflict of interest.
A Justice Ministry statement lifted a censorship order banning reporting on the case, but said the identity of the official who had been detained could not be revealed.