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US, Israeli Officials to Meet Virtually on Rafah, US Official Says

Displaced Palestinians, who fled their homes with their families due to Israeli raids, walk next to the border fence with Egypt, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, 30 March 2024. (EPA)
Displaced Palestinians, who fled their homes with their families due to Israeli raids, walk next to the border fence with Egypt, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, 30 March 2024. (EPA)
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US, Israeli Officials to Meet Virtually on Rafah, US Official Says

Displaced Palestinians, who fled their homes with their families due to Israeli raids, walk next to the border fence with Egypt, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, 30 March 2024. (EPA)
Displaced Palestinians, who fled their homes with their families due to Israeli raids, walk next to the border fence with Egypt, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, 30 March 2024. (EPA)

Senior US and Israeli officials planned to hold a virtual meeting on Monday to discuss the Biden administration's alternative proposals to an Israeli military invasion of Rafah, a US official said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called off a planned visit to Washington last week by a senior Israeli delegation after the US allowed passage of a Gaza ceasefire resolution at the United Nations on Monday, marking a new war-time low in his relations with President Joe Biden.

Two days later Israel asked the White House to reschedule a high-level meeting on military plans for Gaza's southern city of Rafah, officials said, in an apparent bid to ease tensions between the two allies.

The United States, concerned about a deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, wants Israel to consider alternatives to a ground invasion of Rafah, the last relatively safe haven for more than 1 million displaced Palestinian civilians.

The US team in the talks will be led by Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the official said.

More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 63 in the past 24 hours, in Israel's six-month military offensive in Gaza, according to the Palestinian health authorities.

Israel's retaliation began after an Oct. 7 attack in which Hamas gunmen breached the Israeli border to kill 1,200 people and take 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.