N’DJAMENA: Around 320 Sudanese soldiers have fled the fighting raging in their country to neighboring Chad, the country’s defense minister said Wednesday.
“They arrived in our territory, were disarmed and detained” on Sunday, General Daoud Yaya Brahim told a press conference, saying the troops feared being killed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) battling those of army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan.
“The situation in Sudan is worrying and deplorable, we have taken all the necessary measures in the face of this crisis,” the minister said.

RAMALLAH: The international community must prevent Israel’s “dangerous” escalation of activities in Jerusalem amid a surge in violence and arrests, Palestine’s Minister of Jerusalem Affairs Fadi Al-Hadmi has said.

His appeal came as the Israeli army and police escalated incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque two days before the end of Ramadan, and stepped up arrests of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Palestinian sources said that Israeli authorities rounded up 13 people at dawn on Wednesday.

LALISH, Iraq: One by one, members of Iraq’s minority Yazidi community light oil lamps to mark their New Year at a sacred shrine, but for Omar Sinan the celebration cannot erase the atrocities of extremist rule.
In 2014, the Daesh group swept across swathes of Iraq, carrying out horrific violence against the Kurdish-speaking community whose non-Muslim faith the extremists considered heretical.
Daesh massacred thousands of men and abducted thousands of women and girls as sex slaves.

GENEVA: The World Health Organization on Tuesday warned the Covid pandemic was still volatile, saying there could be further trouble before the virus settles into a predictable pattern.
In the last 28 days, more than 23,000 deaths and three million new cases have been reported to the WHO, in the context of much-reduced testing.
While the numbers are decreasing, “that’s still a lot of people dying and that’s still a lot of people getting sick,” WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told a press conference.

RAMALLAH: The disastrous consequences of an ongoing strike by UN Relief and Work Agency’s 3,600 employees in the West Bank are showing in the health and education sectors and other services provided by the UNRWA for the million Palestinian refugees in the West Bank.
UNRWA sources say that the employees union in the West Bank has been on strike for two months, demanding a pay hike. But the agency is in a challenging financial situation and cannot raise wages.